Screen Volume 16 Issue 1

by Bob yVilloughby
and Richard Schickel

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Editorial

5

In Screen v 15 nn i and 2 we published an article by Charles Barr
on Ealing Studios: ‘ Projecting Britain and the British Character *.
Charles Barr provided a thematic analysis of the studio’s output
under Michael Balcon, particularly as expressed, with individual
variations, in the films of the main directors to work there. He
showed, however, that these films were the product of a much
wider group than the directors, the studio’s ‘ creative elite ’, and
that the thematic complex reflects the ‘ total social and cultural
climate ’ in Britain at the time. In this number, John Ellis ap-
proaches Ealing’s output during the same period from another
angle. He shows how the relations of production at Ealing studios,
that is, the technical and financial conditions, the organisation of
labour, the available aesthetic instrumentarium, ensured the elite’s
control over the product until it entered into distribution, and how
the meanings they intended to convey in the films reflected their
class position. However, as John Ellis points out, a text once
released into drculation escapes the control of its immediate pro-
ducers, the domination they were able to exercise over the pro-
duction process. The readers of a text may impose their own
readings, and the readers in the case of the popular cinema come
largely from other classes than the Ealing elite. But for all that,
the reader is not * free ’ to invent his or her own reading of the
film. A reading which may not be that of the makers imposes
itself on the reader, it has a force which catmot simply be denied.
This is true even if the reading finally accepted is not the one
spontaneously experienced; it is by its force that the reader judges
the reading of the critic or his or her own re-reading.

It is at this point that classical semiotics breaks down as an
approach to the study of the text, including the film text. Despite
the insistence of the tradition that stems from Saussure on an
irreducible core of arbitrariness in the sign, this arbitrariness tends
to be seen as an agreed convention at the social level, imposed
arbitrarily on the individual, not on the conscience collective.
Aesthetic semiotics, concerned with motivated signs, is even more
bound to regard aesthetic codes as self-evident conventions, or
else as freely chosen by the reader (ie the critic-semiotidan) or
imposed by dedsion groups whose power of imposition remains
undefined. Classical semiotics is restricted to a rigorous description
of a reigning system of signification, accepted as given, in force:
it cannot explain this force of signs, the energies it presupposes,
or the construction of the point established by this force as the
point from which the description is made, the point of interpre-
tation “ that is. the construction of the subject. Hence the concern,
expressed in Screen and elsewhere, to re-cast semiotics in a frame-

6 work defined by psychoanalysis, for psychoanalysis is precisely a
theory of the symbolic system as imposed on the human animal
in its construction into a subject, and the dynamics and economics
that imposition and construction imply.

In the next number of Screen we plan to discuss these issues at
greater length, in particular their implications for the study of the
cinema. Meanwhile, Stephen Heath's article, the first part of which
we publish in this number, provides an example of a reading which
takes these developments into account. A Hollywood film which,
despite certain stylistic eccentricities, remains in the classical
tradition of cinematic narrative is described using codes established
by Christian Metz among others, but the purpose is not to provide
a more correct or ‘ scientific ’ description than either the naive
self-evident plot summary or the critical * interpretation ’ can pro-
vide - on the contrary, a number of both types of coding are
incorporated into the material to be analysed. Rather the reading
seeks out the resistances implied by the imposition of these codes,
traces of the work narration presupposes but denies. Stephen
Heath’s article is thus an extension of a tradition of work on the
American narrative cinema exemplified by the Cahiers du cinema
study of Young Mister Lincoln {Screen v 13 n 3) and Raymond
Bellour’s examination of the Bodega Bay sequence from The Birds
(unpublished translation by the Educational Advisory Service of
the BH).

Ben Brewster

Admowledgement. The translation of Raymond Bellour: ‘The Obvious
and the Code ’ in Screen v 15 n 4, Winter 1974/5, was by Diana Matias.

The special event at this year’s Edinburgh International
Film Festival is to be a series of screenings and seminars
organised by the editorial board of Screen on the theme
Brecht and the Cinema/Film and Politics. The topic is
divided into three areas: Brecht’s own work in the cinema,
the contemporary revplutionary film as an application of
Brechtian dramaturgy, and the influence of Brecht on the
British cinema. Films to be screened include Kuhle Wampe.
The Threepenny Opera and Hangmen also Die in the first
area; Tout va bien. History Lesson and Dear Summer
Sister in the second; and Sparrows Can't Sing, 0 Lucky
Man! and The Gangster Show in the third. The event will
take place from August 25th to 30th. Details can be
obtained from -Lynda Myles, Edinburgh International Film
Festival. 3 Randolph Crescent, Edinburgh EH3 7TJ.

7

Film and System: Terms of Analysis
Part I

Stephen Heath

The following piece has nothing definitive about it; it is offered for
discussion in an area — the analysis of film — where, for a variety
of reasons, little of real importance has yet been achieved. The
sole ambition here is to pose something of the terms of that
analysis, understanding by * terms ’ not so much a set of rigorously
defined concepts as a series of moments, of problems encountered:
what is given is, as it were, an analysis in progress, in the process
of the construction - in response to its object -of method and
concept. Hence the effect of its organisation, the constant doubting
back over a number of centres, a spiral of preoccupations rather
than a straight exposition. For reasons of length, moreover, the
piece has had to be separated from the theoretical and method-
ological considerations which form its conclusion.

An initial version of the analysis was developed in the course of
a seminar on film theory held in November 1974 and I am grate-
ful to the participants for their attention and guidance. Thanks are
also due to the Slade Film Unit and to Nicky North and Lez Cooke
of the BFl Educational Advisory Service for their considerable
material help.

I

This text is devoted to the analysis of a single film. To say that,
however, is to raise questions as to the nature and purpose of such
an analysis and, in order to avoid misunderstanding, it is necessary
from the outset to attempt to answer, or at least to delimit, certain
of these.

The analysis has two determining aims: firstly, it seeks to
describe the functioning of a single filmic system (‘ functioning ’
might be stressed immediately: the aim is not, even were this

8 theoretically conceivable, to provide an exhaustive account of the
meaning of the film but to indicate its movement, the logic of its
production); secondly, in so doing, it seeks to examine and work
through some of the problems surrounding * film analysis ’ (the
reading of films), and to introduce and discuss, provisionally, one
or two theoretical concepts of use in the resolution of those
problems (and in the description of the functioning of the par-
ticular filmic system under consideration). These aims form the
scope of the analysis and their realisation contains within that
scope general issues concerning the articulation of semiotics and
psychoanalysis and then the importance of that articulation for
historical materialism.

It is easy enough to suggest at once that these issues crystallise
round the instance of the subject and the process of construction-
reconstruction. the shifting regulation of maintenance. The notion
of a shifting regulation is moreover, as will be seen, fundamental
to the practice of film: movement held and checked in the diegetic
space, an activity of reconstitution. It is here that the materialist
articulation of semiotics and psychoanalysis and its appearance
within the scope of the analysis of film become clearer. Recon-
stitution is the relation across the instance of the subject between
the primary regulation (the construction of the individual subject)
and the definition of this construction in specific signifying prac-
tices, its reconstruction or replacement, where ‘ replacement ’
means not merely the repetition of the place of that construction
but also, more difiicultly, the supplacement - the overplacement:
supplementation or, in certain circumstances, supplantation (critical
interruption) - of that construction in the place of its repetition, a
refiguration of the subject. It is precisely the figure of the subject
as turning-point (circulation) between image and industry (poles
of the cinematic institution) which demands study in the analysis
of films. The hypothesis, in short, is that ideology depends crucially
on the establishment of a range of ‘ machines ’ (of institutions)
which move - transference of desire - the subject (‘ sender * and
‘ receiver ’) in a ceaseless appropriation of the symbolic into the
imaginary, production into .fiction. In film, it is narrative that has
served as the mode of that appropriation, the very mirror of the
instance of the subject in its reconstitution.

Thus the general issues mentioned above come together in the
terms of this present analysis, which endeavours to elucidate the
activity of film from the demonstration of the functioning of a par-
ticular filmic system; a demonstration which may be called semiotic
if one understands by that an attention not simply to the inonci
(the accepted field of linguistics and of semiology in its initial
forms) but equally to the ^nonciation and the frictions of the two
(such an attention being the necessary basis for the posing of
semiotics within materialism and focussing the pivotal position
of psychoanalysis as, exactly. ‘ materialist theory of language * in

this respect). What is in question is not the proposal of a meaning
- a film can always be seized pertinently under a variety of read-
ings: reference will be made to some of those given for this film
without in any sense attempting to ‘ refute * them: the point
is not to wage a war of interpretations: rather, it is a matter of
showing the design of the film in its system (the ambiguity of the
word is not without value: the concern is with the organisation of
the film in its effects, its positions). The filmic system is the film
as moving theatre: the interest here is in that production and its
productions, its assignation of readings, and then in the shifts
between the t\vo, their ‘ overturning ’.

These preliminary remarks have leant somewhat haphazardly on
expressions which need to be clearly distinguished in their usage.
By ‘ film ’ is meant the given unit of discourse, the individual work
(notions that are, of course, immediately problematic: what deter-
mines and defines the given unity.? the finition of the work? - the
answer hinges on the achievement of homeostasis, the enclosure
of, precisely, the work of the film back onto itself in a perfect
whole, the film as ‘ work ’: modern cinema in so far as it operates
as ‘ deconstruction ’ is the problematisation of this idea of the
film: think, to take a simple example, of the extensibility of
Rivette’s Out I and the play between it and the shorter version.
Spectre). This usage, which is that of everyday speech (since, as a
result of the dominant modes of realisation and consumption, to
talk of film is to talk of specified units, works with titles),
evidently contains two areas of reference which, though shading
into one another, can be separated out if required: on the one
hand, the film as text engaging the action of reception (‘ I saw a
good film last night’): on the other, the film taken more in its
materiality as object (‘ the film was made in just under three
months ’). In cases where confusion might arise, the former will
be specified by use of the term ‘ filmic text ‘ Filmic system ’ is
employed to refer to the particular film (filmic text) in the activity
of its production, its work. Defined in this way. the concept of
filmic system approaches Metz’s definition of the singular or textual
system of a film - ‘ Every film has its particular structure, which
is an overall organisation, a network in which everything holds
together, in short a system: but this system is valid only for the
one film: it is a configuration resulting from various choices, as
from a certain combination of the elements chosen ’ (Langage
et cinema, Paris 1971, p 46: now translated as Language and
Cinema. The Hague 1974. p 63) - yet keeps the distance of a
stress on structuration rather than structure, on the functioning
of the film as activity of systematisation produdng a number of
systems and partial systems rather than as product of an overall
structure of organisation (it has to be said that Metz’s definition

10 brought with it, via the concept of ‘ filmic writing crucial notions
of operation and displacement and that he currently envisages this
problem in terms of textual systematicity as opposed to those of
a textual system). All of which is not to deny the effort of classic
cinema towards homogeneity (such an effort, indeed, might well
be taken as the fundamental trait of that cinema), but, jiist as
narrative never exhausts the image, homogeneity is always an effect
of the film and not the filmic system, which is precisely the pro-
duction of that homogeneity. Homogeneity is haunted by the
material practice it represses and the tropes of that repression, the
forms of continuity, provoke within the texture of the film the
figures - the edging, the margin - of the loss by which it moves;
permanent battle for the resolution of that loss on which, however,
it structurally depends, mediation between image and discourse,
narrative can never contain the whole film which permanently
exceeds its fictions. ‘ Filmic system ’, therefore, always means at
least this: the ‘ system * of the film in so far as the film is the
organisation of a homogeneity and the material outside inscribed
in the operation of that organisation as its contradiction. Finally,
by ‘ cinematic institution ’ is understood, after Metz, the double
machine of cinema as industry and ideological apparatus to the
extent to which the former depends on the effect of the latter, on,
that is, the metapsychological realisation of a placing of sub-
jectivity that determines - renews - the circulation of capital,
dnema being nothing less than a massive investment in the subject.

These terminological clarifications lead on to a further question,
that of the range of the generalisations given here concerning
dnema and film (all films? some films?). The analysis sketched out
in what follows is of one film, an American film made in Holly-
wood in the 1950’s for one of the important companies, and
the range may therefore be specified as that of classic narrative
dnema. Such a specification does not, however, in any way pre-
judge the issue of three important points: 1. that between this
single film and the remarks towards the characterisation of classic
narrative cinema there may not be a great many distinctions and
qualifications to be made (‘ classic narrative cinema ’ has here the
status of a model; no individual film is that model - in Hollywood
itself, the problem was always one of variation, the refashioning
of the same); 2. that the remarks may not in respect of certain
topics have a generality beyond that of classic narrative dnema;
3. that the remarks may not have something to say, as it were in
counterpoint, about a modem cinema working against this model.
Those points can be be grasped in the procedure of the analysis;
its strategies and difficulties, its connections and its hesitations,
are focussed round the very use of the notion of filmic system with
its response in the term ‘ system * to the aim of homogeneity in
classic narrative film and its simultaneous attempt to seize that
homogeneity in the logic of its production, to seize the film as

text.

11

II

The film for analysis is Touch of Evil directed by Orson Welles, for
Universal and released in 1958. Leaving aside material factors of
availability, several reasons led to the choice of this film; most
notably, the original intuition (the feeling) of an extremely openly
coded film -an obviousness of systems: from, say, the straight-
forward adoption of stock modes of continuity transition or the
simple coding of shot angles into one or two dramatically avail-
able systems to the easy ‘ difficulty ’ of the various elements that
go to make up the signature ‘ Welles ’ (* baroque ‘ expression-
ism ‘ chiaroscuro ’ - the usual terms for that mixture of effects
of depth of focus. 18.5 distortion, lighting, composition in frame,
etc) - constantly rendered oblique, overturned;, the impression of a
filmic system in which the narrative was constantly deflected, out
of true. Coupled with this, and with the pleasure it involved, was
the accessibility with which the film focussed the imbrication of a
number of determinations - narrative order, author style, star
weighting, ideological message, technical accomplishment - such
accessibility-imbrication being itself a factor in the open/oblique
movement.

It is essential, for the intelligibility of the analysis, to have a
clear grasp of the action of the film and to this end a synopsis
will be given, together with a certain amount of subsidiary informa-
tion relating to * credits By definition, the synopsis is a narrative
outline, the statement of a kind of ideal entity — the narrative (the
diegesis, the story) - that can be realised in a range of matters of
expression (technically, indeed, the synopsis precedes the film, is
as it were the idea on which the film is sold); what it retains is the
set of macro-functions (the main ‘ points ’ of the action) and,
where pertinent (ie narratively relevant), occasional traits of
character or scene. In a sense, the synopsis produces an initial
message of the film (a levej of denotation) as condition of a
secondary message, the film’s ‘ theme ’ or, precisely, its ‘ mean-
ing ’, and the specific modes of realisation then come back into
the argument at this stage as * style ' (a pattern which is enshrined
in the very lay-out of the reviews in the Monthly Film Bulletin).
Conventionally, there is agreement over the first level (mistakes
are decidable); the debate is about meaning and takes place at the
second level.

The problem for this analysis of a filmic system is that it is just
this convention, this division of the film, which is unacceptable; to
study the filmic system is to construct a new obj’ect, to specify
different divisions in the analysis: one might say quickly that in
this perspective there is always a multiplicity of narratives (in-

12 eluding those of the narration) and that it is the figures of the
multiplicity that are cnidal. Which is to conclude that synopsis
here is an intolerable necessity (the paradox holding the move-
ment, the friction, with which the analysis is concerned): intoler-
able because it has to be tolerated against the grain of the film;
necessity because it answers to the ‘ intolerance ’ of the film itself,
the mode of its use of narrative.

Practical difficulties remain even then. The conventional agree-
ment mentioned above masks the inevitable (outside perhaps of a
rigorous formalisation, a narrative calculus) confusion of synopsis
and interpretation, the latter the control of the former with mis-
takes as the symptoms of interference; when we are told, for
instance, that ‘ Welles’ ageing detective in Touch of Evil ... is
sure he knows who committed the crime (although he is wrong) * —
M Wood; ‘ Orson Welles Cambridge Review, October 1974,
p 5 - though a character at the end of the film stresses that
* [Quinlan’s] famous intuition was right after all . . . the kid con-
fessed about that bomb, so, turns out Quinlan was right after
all . . .* — we can be sure, in turn, that we touch the very pressure
of this control. Thus four synopses are provided in the present
case: a minimal account, something like an answer to the ques-
tion ‘ what’s it about? the narrative ‘ image ’ of the film; two
variants or extensions of that common account, taken from books
on Welles; most importantly, a working description of the action
of the film according to the actual sequence of the narration of
events in the film, the description being given in numbered sections
in order to facilitate later reference.

I.

During a murder investigation in a border town, Quinlan, the American
detective in charge, is discovered by Vargas, a Mexican official, to have
planted evidence framing the chief suspect. Despite attacks on his wife
culminating in Quinlan’s attempt to frame her for a murder he himself
commits, Vargas manages to expose the crooked policeman.

2 .

‘ The scenario opposes an old and unscrupulous policeman convinced
of the guilt of a suspect and an upright young official who tries to bring
him down. His back against the wall, Quinlan (the policeman) defends
himself by mounting an abominable blackmail plot against the
latter’s wife, Vargas (the official) only manages to extricate himself by
recording a conversation between Quinlan and his best friend. The action
takes place in a small town on the border between Mexico and the
USA’ (Andr6 Bazin: Orson Welles, Paris 1972, p 115).

3.

‘ The investigation of a drugs crime on the border between the United
States and Mexico is placed in the hands of a certain inspector Quinlan,
Quinlan has no hesitation in forging evidence against those he believes
to be guilty. This he succeeds in doing in the present case thanks to a
local pusher named Grandi, himself under the gravest suspicion in
another connection. Both go to extreme lengths to compromise the

Mexican colleague attached to Quinlan, Vargas, and his wife Susan.

The latter having been kidnapped and drugged, Quinlan gets rids of
his burdensome partner in a hotel room. The plot is discovered by
Vargas who finds an unexpected ally in the person of Menzies, Quinlan’s
friend, who up to then had looked on him as a god but who now with
his own hand kills the crooked policeman ’ (Maurice Bessy: Orson
Welles, Paris 1963, p55).

Note: Quinlan is investigating a murder and not a drugs crime; Grandi
docs not help in the forging of the evidence in that case.

4.

I a Night-time. A bomb is dropped into the boot of a car which then
drives through a small border-town (Los Robles), crossing from the
Mexican to the American side where it explodes a few seconds later with
its two passengers: Rudy Linneker, a wealthy townsman, and Zita, a
stripteaser./ b ‘Mike’ Vargas, a high-ranking Mexican official whose
mission is the investigation of narcotics rackets, is honeymooning in Los
Robles with his wife Susan. Present when the bomb goes off, they are
caught up in the ensuing confusion. Vargas sends Susan back to their
hotel on the Mexican side./ c As she returns to the hotel, Susan is
accosted by a youth (‘ Pancho ’) with a note telling her to follow him for
important news concerning her husband./ d At the scene of the ex-
plosion, Linneker’s daughter, Marcia, is brought to identify her father’s
body and Captain Hank Quinlan arrives to lead the investigation. There
is immediate tension between Quinlan and Vargas over the latter’s status
given that the explosion happened on American territory./ e As Susan
arrives with Pancho at a hotel on the American side, she is tricked into
having her photo taken with him. Inside, she is vaguely threatened by
‘ Uncle Joe ’ Grandi, boss of the Grandi ‘ family ’ (scattered over both
sides of the border) in the absence of his brother whose drugs ring has
just been smashed by Vargas and who is due for judgement in a couple
of days’ time./ f Quinlan conducts a group of collaborators (Sergeant
Pete Menzies, his right-hand man, Adair, the District Attorney, Shwartz,
an official in the DA’s service), together with Vargas, over into Mexico
to obtain information on Zita,/ g Vargas leaves the group to reassine
Susan, now back at their hotel. He catches up again as the group is about
to enter the strip-joint but is confronted by a youth (Risto) with a bottle
of vitriol. During the struggle, the vitriol misses Vargas and splashes
over a poster of Zita. The youth breaks away and Vargas unsuccess-
fully gives chase./ h In the strip-joint, Quinlan obtains no information
and leaves followed by his collaborators. He stops outside at the sound
of a pianola and, alone, enters a meuson close where he encounters
Tanya./ i As Vargas returns to the hotel, Susan is being pestered while
she changes by a torch beam shone through her window by Pancho
from a building opposite. She unscrews the bulb in her room and throws
it at her aggressor. Vargas enters and they leave./ j Pancho calls to
Risto in the street below that Uncle Joe wants to see him. Risto bolts
but is caught by Uncle Joe, furious at the unordered vitriol attack./
k Coming downstairs in the hotel, Vargas is called to the phone con-
cerning the investigation. Outside, Uncle Joe, still angry, sees Vargas
and Susan through the glass front of the hotel and sends another of
his ‘ nephews ’ with an envelope for the latter. Susan takes the envelope
which contains the photo of her and Pancho with written on the back
‘ A souvenir with a million kisses -Pancho ’./I Vargas joins her in the
street and she refuses to return to Mexico City while the investigation
is being cleared up. It is now dawn and, watched by Uncle Joe, they
leave for the motel on the American side of the border where Susan
will be able to stay. Uncle Joe leaves in the same direction./ (Here
followed a scene, cut by the production company, in which Susan is

entrusted to Menzies, he driving Susan to the motel while Vargas
accompanies Quinlan on the investigation.)

n a At the motel, Susan meets the night clerk and goes to bed./ b
Quinlan, Schwartz and Vargas are driven to a construction site belonging
to Linneker. Questions are asked about any missing dymamite and about
Sanchez, fired by Linneker some months previously for meddling with
his daughter and now working as a shoe-salesman. Quinlan recognises
Eddie Famum, an ex-convict. News comes over the car radio that
Sanchez has been picked up and is being held at the apartment he shared
with Marcia./ c At the apartment, Quinlan begins a long interrogation,
convinced that Sanchez and Marcia murdered Linneker for his money,
because of his opposition to their liaison. Tension mounts between Vargas
and Quinlan as a result of the former’s dislike of the treatment being
given Sanchez. While washing in the bathroom, Vargas knocks an empty
shoe-box from a shelf./ d Vargas leaves to phone Susan from a shop
across the street kept by a blind w’oman. Menzies drives up having taken
Susan to the motel accompanied by Grandi who, mistaking him for
Vargas as a result of the car, has been tailing him./ e Vargas arrives
back in the apartment where the interrogation continues. Quinlan has
Menzies search the place and he discovers two sticks of dynamite in the
shoe-box in the bathroom. Vargas accuses Quinlan of framing Sanchez
and leaves with Schwartz./ f Grandi suggests that Vargas is making
trouble and proposes a deal with Quinlan who, leaving Menzies behind,
goes off with him for a drink.

Ill a From the window of her motel room, Susan sees a group of
youths arrive in cars./ b Cruising at speed in Vargas’ car, Vargas and
Schwartz decide to examine records of recent dynamite sales and to check
at Quinlan’s turkey farm for any evidence of use of dynamite./ c At the
motel, the Grandi boys, led by Pancho, have taken over. The night clerk
returns and is hustled into a back room, Susan tries to ring the
police but Pancho blocks the call and then decides to ring Uncle Joe./
d The phone rings in Uncle Joe’s bar where he and Quinlan reach an
agreement/ e Susan is again seen distressed in her motel room,/ f
Schwartz has persimded the DA and Gould, the Chief of Police, to meet
Vargas in the latter’s hotel room to listen to the suspicions against
Qm’nlan. Vargas produces the dynamite sales records which include
details of a purchase by Quinlan. As they read the document, Vargas
tries to phone Susan but the call is stopped by Pancho who claims that
she has left orders not to be disturbed./ g In her room, Susan hears
whispers concerning drugs coming from the other side of the wall./
h Menzies has found Quinlan more or less drunk in a bar and tries to
get him to do something to defend himself against Vargas’ accusations./
i Quinlan arrives in the middle of the discussion in Vargas’ hotel room
and gives back his policeman’s badge. Gould and the DA come violently
to his defence and Vargas leaves with Schwartz. Quinlan is persuaded
to take back the badge and he lets out the accusation that Vargas
is himself mixed up in a drugs racket and that Susan is an addict./ j The
Grandi boys enter Susan’s room./ k The phone rings in Tanya’s: Men-
zies is again trying to track down the whereabouts of Quinlan./ 1 The
boys move round Susan on the bed; as she is grabbed and lifted, the
door is pushed shut./ m Menzies discovers Vargas in the Hall of Records
looking up details of Quinlan’s previous cases. He attempts to tear up
Vargas’ notes but eventually collapses in despair./ n At the motel,
Vargas questions the night clerk as to Susan’s movements. It is now
night-time. The clerk talks of a wild party. Susan’s room is in total dis-
order and Vargas finds that his gun has been taken. When the clerk
reveals that the motel belongs to the Grandi family, Vargas quickly

leaves for the Grand! bar in Los Robles.

15

IV a In a room in the Grand! hotel on the American side, Susan is
lying unconscious and undressed on a bed. Sending away two girls from
the ‘ family Grandi shows Quinlan into the room. Quinlan pulls a gun
on Grandi and forces him to telephone Menzies at the police station,
asking him to have the vice squad sent round. Quinlan then strangles
Grandi and leaves his body hanging over the bed./ b Awaking, Susan
rushes screaming onto the fire escape. Vargas drives past in his car but
she is unable to make him hear./ c Vargas bursts into the Grandi strip-
joint (‘ Grandi’s Rancho Grande O and starts a fight with Pancho and
then with Risto. The police arrive and Schwartz tells Vargas that Si^an
is being held on a murder charge./ d At the police station, Vargas sees
Susan in the cells. Menzies shows him Quinlan’s cane, foimd by Grandi’s
body./ e As Vargas wires up Menzies with a portable microphone-
transmitter, Quinlan is inside Tanya’s. Menzies gets him out into the
street./ f With Vargas hiding alongside them recording their conversa-
tion, Quinlan and Menzies walk through a wasteland of oil pumps on
the Mexican side. Quinlan acknowledges that he has framed suspects,
using Menzies as his tool. He shoots Menzies who in turn shoots him in
order to protect Vargas. As the latter is reunited with Susan, Schwartz
and Tanya stand looking at Quinlan’s body. Tanya leaves.

Note: The segmentation here operates at the level of the narrative
signified according to simple criteria of imity of action, unity of
characters, xmity of place; it has no analytic status other than that of
allowing reference to the film as narrative.

Credits:

Shot in 1957 at Universal Studios, Hollywood, and on location at Venice,
California. First shown in USA in February 1958.

Production Company “Universal; Producer - Albert Zugsmith; Pro-
duction Manager -F D Thompson; Director- Orson Welles (additional
‘ continuity ’ scenes shot by Harry Keller, a TV director under contract
at Universal); Assistant Directors - Phil Bowles, Terry Nelson; Script -
Orson Welles (from the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson; Welles
seems not to have read the novel, but to have adapted an adaptation
made by a Universal writer; there arc major dUTerences from the novel
in narrative, characters, names, locations, etc); Director of Photography -
Russell Metty (Metty had previously worked with Welles on parts of
The Magnificent Ambersons and on The Stranger); Editors- Virgil
Vogel, Aaron Stell, Orson Welles (Welles cut the picture with Vogel,
recut it with Stell but was absent from the final editing); Art Directors -
Alexander Golitzen, , Robert Clatworthy; Set Directors - Russell A
Gausman, John P Austin; Music -Henry Mancini; Musical Supervisor -
Joseph Gershenson; Costumes - Bill Thomas; Sound -Leslie I Carey,
Frank Wilkinson.

Cast: Hank Quinlan - Orson Welles; Miguel ‘Mike’ Vargas - Charlton
Heston; Susan Vargas -Janet Leigh; Sergeant Pete Menzies- Joseph
Calleia; Uncle Joe Grandi — Akim Tamiroff; Pancho— Valentin De
Vargas; District Attorney Adair -Ray Collins; Motel Clerk (‘Night
Man’) -Dennis Weaver; Schwartz - Mort Mills; Marcia Linneker-
Joanna Moore; Tanya -Marlene Dietrich; Manolo Sanchez - Victor
Millan; Risto -Lalo Rios; Gang leader- Mercedes McCambridge;
Detective- Joseph Gotten; Strip-joint Madame -Zsa Zsa Gabor (both
Zsa Zsa Gabor and Marlene Dietrich are described in the film’s opening
credits as ‘Guest Stars’); Blaine -Phil Harvey; Blonde -Joi Lansing;

i6 Gould -Harry Shannon; Casey -Rusty Wescoatt; Gang members -
Wayne Taylor, Ken Miller, Raymond Rodriguez; Ginnie- Arlene
McQuade; Lackey - Domenick . Delgarde; Young delinquent - Joe
Basulto; Jackie- Jennie Dias; Bobbie- Yolanda Bojorquez; Lia- Eleanor
Dorado. (This cast list is both incomplete and overcomplete : derived
from a variety of sources, it misses certain named characters - Rudy
Linneker, Eddie Famiim, Ed Hanson -and includes a number of
character names not .given in the film -Blaine, Casey, Ginnie,
Lackey (?), Jackie, Bobbie - making identification more or less difficult.)

Running time - 93 minutes.

Ill

The working synopsis given above provides some indication of the
narrative of Touch of Evil; tvhat then remains to be determined is
the economy of that narrative, its articulation cinematically as
narrative in the discourse of the film, and, within the terms of that
economy, the logic of its production. The word ‘ economy ’ is used
both for the recognition it offers of the fundamentally economical
purpose of classic narrative in cinema (principles of practicability,
avoidance of waste, homogenisation) and for its stress on the rela-
tion of that purpose to a transference and restabilisation of energy
(from the symbolic to the imaginary in the image of that homo-
genisation: the administration of the film as coalescence of signi-
fied and signifier); by ‘logic’ is meant the pressure of this
economy: how it functions,.what it contains, what it answers to,
and so the excess of its order, the other scene of its production
figured at the very points of subtraction in the terms of the repre-
sentation. Economy and logic in their movement and displacement
constitute the filmic system.

There exists a model for the description of the organisation of
the narrative in classic dnema which is both predse and authorita-
tive: Metz’s grande syntagmatique or ‘ large syntagmatic category ’,
the elucidation of that cinematic code which organises the most
usual spatio-temporal order of the sequence [Essats sur la signifi-
cation au cinema I, Paris 1968, pp lasf; Film language, NY 1974,
pp i24f). The effective translation of the reference given by the
model into the analysis of a particular filmic system, however, raises
problems; in one sense it is relatively easy to divide up Touch of
Evil into autonomous segments as these are defined in their various
types in the grande syntagmatique. while in another to do so is
extremely difficult.' Part of the difficulty is the force of the flow
of the action, a continuity which can often seem to elide its farms
(for Metz, certain types lack firmness: ‘The ordinary sequence or
the scene have contours which are somewhat hazy, it is often hard
to pull them out of the realm of the unformed, to isolate them
from the general filmic flow ’ - Essais sur la signification au cinema

ia

11, Paris 1972, p 206) and part again, interdependent with this, 27
is the pull of the logic of the narrative economy, the movement-
displacement of the filmic system which takes up segments in and
across a number of systems and partial systems; hence, for instance,
the hesitation shown by Bellour in his piece on The Birds {Cahiers
du cinema n 216. October 1969, p 25) as to the classification* of
the segment in question:

‘ It would not be correct to describe this segment as an “ ordinary
sequence ” since, although its consecutiveness appears to be a
single order, it is not discontinuous; it might be called an
“ alternating narrative syntagm ” if the split between the person
seeing and his vision, forming a double action, were interpreted
as a double temporal consecutiveness; or, finally, a “ scene ” if
one recognises in it the rule of a single continuous consecutiveness.’

The result of the difficulty is to render highly attractive the
resurrection of the notion of ‘ sequence ’ — which in the grande
syntagmatique is limited to quite specific types of autonomous
segment -to describe an extended unit of filmic discourse that
may well comprise more than one autonomous segment (the
sequence of Susan’s enforced singing career in Citizen Kane, for
example, made up of episodic sequence; scene, bracketing syntagm
and sequence shot) or, further away from that common use of the
term, a less extensive unit within which and across which the play
of the systems pertinent in the analysis demands a suppleness (a
plurality) of definition. Here too, the Bellour piece mentioned earlier
is indicative in its preference for ‘ sequence ’ over and above, as
it were, the Metzian classification:

‘ “Sequence ’’ is an approximate term, often deceptive with regard
to that flexible and continuous art of narration characteristic of
the classicism of the great American cinema. Thus, although the
present section has its justification, it also has its arbitrariness.

Neither the beginning nor the end can properly be said to constitute
this section of film as a closed and strictly definable unit. The
analysis could go beyond them,*even perhaps to the extent of
rediscovering the film in its entirety. But inversely, it is the analysis
which determines the autonomy of this section, precisely by the
range of its movement and its very possibility ’ (ibid).

Which is to say that the analysis of a filmic system needs to break
the simple tourniquet of either the rigorous division of the grande
syntagmatique (rigorous, but inevitably inadequate in respect of
that system) or the loose generality of the ordinary breakdown into
sequences (‘ units of the overall diegesis, referential units, or again,
units of the script; " main parts ’’ which correspond less to the film
than to the written account one might give of it, or to the memory
retained of the film as a whole’ - Metz: Essais II, p 129).

The grande syntagmatique holds together in its analysis signified

28 and signifier, form of content and form of expression (disposition
of shots according to the realisation of a spatio-temporal order):
the problem is the development of a similar analytic grasp in rela-
tion to an object where elements of code are displaced in the mesh
of systems and partial systems. Thus the complete account of the
division of Touch of Evil into autonomous segments is no‘t included
in this version of the present analysis which attempts instead to
operate a variety of sequence divisions of differing length and
status in order to bring out the terms of that mesh, to construct
the filmic system. As was emphasised above, such a construction,
such an object, involves an attention to the film as a production
whose functioning is irreducible simply to formulations of code
and use, cinematic and non-cinematic, and so on. It might be
remembered in this context how psychoanalysis operates a break-
down of language which cuts across and undercuts that of linguis-
tics (Lacan indeed distinguishes langage and lalangue: consistent
structure, the knowledge of linguistics, and effective insistence, the
knowledge of the unconscious; ‘ The unconscious is a knowledge,
a know-how-to-do with lalangue. And what one knows how to do
with lalangue goes a long way beyond what can be described in
terms of langage ' - Le Seminaire livre XX: Encore, Paris 1975,
p 127) without ceasing for all that to be a - the.!*-- fundamental
engagment with language in the material specificity of its deter-
minations, the articulations of the heterogeneity of process of the
subject. The analogy is helpful, and more than an analogy: its
object the filmic system, analysis here disturbs the models of the
semiology of cinema; and that disturbance, functioning of the 1.1m
as production, refinds a process of which psychoanalysis is. exactly,
the ‘ approach

In the context of these remarks, three segments will be looked
at in some detail: the beginning of the film (la-Il) and two
passages (I h, IV e) that rhyme from one end of the film to the
other. Any choice has its degree of arbitrariness, but, in the dia-
lectic bet\veen fragment and system which is the movement of the
analysis, the reasons for this choice will quickly become clear.

IV

The definition of the beginning, in fact, brings with it a further
degree of arbitrariness. It would be possible to take as the begin-
ning of Touch of Evil the planting of the bomb and its explosion,
perfectly enclosed in an initial sequence-shot (I a); or again, the
portion of the film up to the cut from Quinlan leaving Tanya’s to
Vargas walking back to his hotel (la-Ih): the main characters
have been introduced, the crime and its investigation posed. The
present analysis, however, understands the beginning as a con-
siderably longer section of the film -up to the first establishing

shot of the motel (I a - 1 1 ). Terminated by what is for the film a 29
strong mark of punctuation (dissolve) and a shift of locale (the
motel outside the town), this section has the coherence of the
unities of time (night to day), place (Los Robles) and action (a
continuous advance with no doubling back or past explanation).

More crucially, it sets in play the elements - of narrative and dis-
course and the crossing of the two - which in their systematisation-
perturbation (the excess over the narrative action) turn the filmic
system. Above all. it opens up the displacement of the fiction, of
the image of the narrative, inaugurates the sliding friction of the
system of Touch of Evil: what place do ‘ I ’ — subject and figurant -
occupy? what is the position of the film? Significantly, in a kind of
disjunctive agreement with the diegetic coherence previously cited,
the sequence, which has already come to a halt with the drift from
strip-joint to Tanya’s (I h), ends to dissolve into the pure gratuity
of the motel clerk (II a): that is, as at Tanya’s, the return of a
sexuality of which the narrative is the impossible alignment. For
this systematic beginning, the bomb planting is the premiss and
the first half to Tanya’s a loop which the second concludes (as one
‘ concludes ’ a deal, accepting and thereby inaugurating) through
the establishing confirmation of a series of figures of exchange as
the action of the filmic system. The analysis of the beginning is
precisely the analysis of this establishment over the progress of
the narrative.

With regard to the narrative, three diegetic lines can be dis-
tinguished in the beginning section: 1, the ‘ event ’ - the planting
of the bomb and its explosion; 2. the start of the police investiga-
tion; 3. the attacks on Susan as Vargas’ wife and the subsequent
attacks against Vargas himself. 1. is entirely exhausted in this
section; and from the very outset, coinciding as it does with the
opening shot and forming very much a sort of narrative premiss
(it can be noted that the credits appear during the shot, shown
over the car travelling through the town). 2, and 3., by contrast, are
the decisive strands of the film’s narrative which effectively inter-
twines them until they hold together as one thread (Quinlan’s
partnership with Grand! confuses investigation and attacks); in
this section, the strands are mediated by Vargas who physically
and constantly transfers from one to the other, and polarised by
Quinlan and Susan as respective focuses of the two strands (the
confusion of this clarity in the narrative is also the systematic
commotion of the problem of Susan’s ‘ position ’ as subject of
desire).

The section runs 2. and 3. in parallel, picking up now one, now
the other, without interrupting the single temporal advance: each
time the film comes back to a strand, it does so allowing for the

30 period elapsed since its last appearance; the sequence is con-
secutive, not simultaneous (2.1/ 3.2/ 2.3/ 3.4/ 2.5/ .... not 2.1/
3.1/ 2.2/ 3.2/ 2.3/ 3.3/ . - . Figure I indicates the progression
of the alternation, and It will be noted at once that Vargas’ trans-
ference from strand to strand lapses at 2.11 where he rejoins
Menzies after the chase with Risto and exits as though to catch up

FIGURE I

1 . "Event"- planting of bomb and explosion {sequence shot)

2.1

2.3

2.5

2.7

2.9

2.11

Scene of explosion

Susan 22

Susan accosted by Pancho

Quinlan arrives on<

scene

\3.4

Susan meets Uncle Joe
Grandi

Quinlan team moves<

across border

V^gas

Susan and \^rgas at
hotel

Quinlan and men<^

looking back to
hotel

Quinlan team
about to enter

Vhrgas

Vbrgas

Susan and Vargas at
hotel, Risto waiting

strip-joint

3.1 OVbrgas struggles with

Vargas

Risto

\fergas rejoins
Menzies

2.1 2 Strip-joint
Street
Tanya's

3.13 N^rgas and Susan/the
Grandi family

(here begins a new pattern of
alternation \A4iich continues
until the dissolve to the motel)

with Quinlan in the strip-joint but is then absent from 2.12, only
being rediscovered in 3.13 which opens with a shot of him going
back to his hotel. This absence produces the sole break in the
consecutiveness: if in 2.11 Vargas in fact exits to go back to the
hotel, 3.13 finds him. as it were, at the outset of that action, just
crossing the street (moreover, there is a smooth continuity link:

exit towards camera off left in 2.11/ enter far right moving across 31
down left in 3.13). The break is not emphatic (and could indeed
be disputed) but a certain interruption can be felt and demon-
strated at 2.12, and it is significant that a loss of narrative time
should be marked in this way, a moment in which Vargas cannot
figure.

. Adopting the classification of the grande syntagmatique, the
section might be expressed as:

(i) Autonomous shot - Sequence shot from the planting of the
bomb to the sound of the explosion (‘ an entire scene treated in a
single shot; the shot derives its autonomy from the unity of
action ’).

(ii) Autonomous shot - A brief shot of the car exploding and
bursting into flames. The decision to call this an insert raises
difficulties since, firstly, it comes between two autonomous seg-
ments (rather than within one) and, secondly, it does not fit com-
fortably into any of the four types of insert recognised by the
grande syntagmatique. It can best be characterised perhaps as an
explanatory insert which describes - as opposed to explaining (we
already know) - the cause of the sound heard off at the close of
the previous segment; it is not an ‘ enlarged detail ’ nor is it
‘ removed from its empirical space but it is related in some sense
to a ‘ mental operation ’, showing what Vargas and Susan see as
they turn in (i) at the sound off. (The difficulties, and hence the
somewhat evasive handling of the grande syntagmatique, could be
avoided either by making this a sequence-shot or by considering
it as a true insert within a scene stretching over 1. and 2.1, but
the former would simply be inaccurate and the latter has little
to recommend it; we are up against that problem of the effective
translation of the model into the analysis of the filmic system.)

(iii) Alternating syntagm - It may seem dubious to subsume the
extent of the film from 2.1 to 2.11 as a single autonomous segment,
yet such a procedure answers to the economy of the film’s narra-
tive, (It is also worth drawing attention to the binding over of the
passage: the first shot of 2.1 has Vargas running from right to left
towards the camera/ the last shot of 2.11 has him exiting towards
camera off left -the ‘ completion ’ of the initial movement.) This
said, it needs to be stressed that the branches of the alternation
are organised individually as a succession of scenes (unity of place,
unity of action, coincidence between diegetic time and discursive
time); with the exception of 2.5, 3.6 and 2.7 which are each one
shot, are elements, that is, of a quicker alternation more charac-
teristic of what is normally understood as an alternating syntagm
- the greater the distance between the alternations, the less the
alternation is grasped significantly as such. The last point, more-
over, brings us to the discrepancy between the segment proposed
here and the alternating syntagm as defined in the grande syn-
tagmatique, the montage alternatively of ‘ t\vo or more series of

32 events in such a way that within each series the temporal rela-
tionships are consecutive, but that, between the series taken as
wholes, the temporal relationship is one of simultaneity In the
present instance, as was seen above, the relationship between the
wholes is itself consecutive: 3.2 is the time between the end of 2.1
and the arrival of the District Attorney in 2.3; 2.3 is* the time
between Susan deciding to follow Pancho in 3.2 and her arrival
with him at the hotel in 3.4; and so on. The classification as
alternating syntagm is nevertheless retained in response to the
pressure of the alternation; merely to describe the constitutive
elements as so many discrete units, scenes and autonomous shots,
would be to miss that guiding significance - and alternation, across
every level, is one of the major figures of the filmic system: a kind
of incessant exchange which leaves nothing in place. (It should be
remembered that Metz himself regards the alternating syntagm
as the most problematic of the grande syntagmatique types — wit-
ness the various difficulties it encounters in the course of the break-
down of Adieu Philippine - see Essais J, pp 15 if; Film Language,
pp I49f).

(iv) Autonomous shot - Sequence-shot of Quinlan and his team
of followers in the strip-joint.

(v) Scene ivith insert — Quinlan and his men come out into the
street, and Quinlan then moves alone towards Tanya’s; each of
these two ‘ moments ’ being given in a single, lengthy, shot and
separated by a brief shot of the pianola inside Tanya’s playing
away. The pianola shot has some of the characteristics of the ex-
planatory insert but is more finely described as a displaced diegetic
insert: it shows the cause of the sound and in so doing it operates
a prolepsis, anticipating Quinlan’s actual entry into Tanya’s.

(vi) Scene — Quinlan inside Tanya’s. (These last three segments
are the division of what is given in Figure I as 2.12 and, considered
in terms of the filmic system, they have a tight unity of ‘ inter-
displacement ’.)

(vii) Scene - The torch-beam attack on Susan as Vargas returns
to the hotel; ‘ through means that are already filmic (separate shots
that are later combined), the scene reconstructs a unit still ex-
perienced as being “ concrete ”: a place, a moment in time, an
action, compact and specific . . . the signifier is fragmentary in the
scene . . . but the signified is perceived in unified and continuous
fashion ’; as in (vi), the basic fragmentation here is shot/reverse
shot.

(viii) Alternating syntugm - Though the same reservations apply
as for (iii), what now begins is essentially a pattern of alternation
between Vargas-Susan and the Grandi clan in one consecutive
advance. The portion of film rather abniptly listed in Figure I as
3.13 is thus detailed in Figure II as a movement similar to that of
2.1-2.11, making clear the progression: 2. alternates with 3. which
splits in turn into the alternation of 3A and 3B. A careful com-

parison of the two diagrams also reveals the development of the
film in bands of repetition and difference (in rhymes): the alter-
nation is repeated with Uncle Joe Grandi in the structural position
of Quinlan - the look off towards Susan and Vargas (2.7 and

FIGURE II

3.1 3 "Event"- Pancho's torch-beam attack on Susan as
\fergas returns to hotel (scene)

3A.1 4VbrgasandSusan
in hotel room

3A.1 6 Vbrgas and Susan
come downstairs

3A.1 8 Vbrgas and Susan
in reception hall

3A.20 Susan receives ■
letter

3B.1 5 Risto chased and
caught by
Uncle Joe Grandi

3B.1 7 Uncle Joe

quarrelling, looks
off towards hotel

-38.1 9 Uncle Joe looking,
.Letter sends envelope

Letter

3A.21 Vhrgasand Susan
in front of hotel,
go to car

3A23 Vhrgas and Susan
in car

3A.25 Vbrgas and Susan
drive off

3B.22 Uncle Joe and
Risto watching

3B.24 Uncle Joe and
Risto watching

3B.26 Uncle Joe drives off
in same direction.
Dissolve to motel

3B.17); the trigger of the pattern is an event that divides Vargas
from Susan - in 1. the explosion breaks a kiss and Susan is sent
back to the hotel with Pancho interposing himself en route, in
3.13 Pancho is interposed literally between Vargas returning to the

34 hotel and Susan in her room (from a high angle shot of Vargas in
the street, the camera pans to Pancho shining the torch before a
cut to Susan), \vith the division subsequently ratified in the argu-
ment as to where Susan should go; the equivalent in 3A and 3B
to the exchange over of Vargas between 2. and 3. is simply the
letter, which, however, is a failed exchange (symptomatically, the
letter drops right out of the narrative) - Grandi’s contact wth
Susan has to pass through Quinlan (the double look, the deal later
on) and this is to put himself in place as Quinlan, but equally for
Quinlan, hence as Susan; the comparison of the diagrams touches
immediately on the crucial action of multiple exchange that is the
production of the filmic system.

Eight autonomous segments for some twenty-five minutes of
narrative film: the number is small and, even if it reflects the con-
struction (use of extended shots, extreme temporal continuity),
could doubtless be increased according to the possibility of further
breakdown discussed under (iii) and likewise applicable to (viii).
The purpose here was not to arrive at a definitive account but to
offer a preliminary approach to the section and to bring out one or
t;vo issues from the perspective provided by the grande syntagma-
tique. Once again, this is very much an analysis in progress.

That perspective, moreover, allows us to rectify a potential mis-
understanding with regard to the temporal continuity of the section
as hitherto described. Evidently, there is a disjunction benveen
narrative time (night to dawn) and the time of the narration
(twenty-five minutes); the point is that the disjunction is never, as
it were, ‘ in ’ the segments themselves (the section contains no
sequences in the strict sense of the grande syntagmatique - con-
catenations with discontinuity) nor ‘ between ’ them (articulated
significantly from one to the other; an example would be the open-
ing of The Maltese Falcon: the scene in the Spade and Archer
office which ends ^vith Archer agreeing to help Brigid O’Shaunessy
in the evening is followed by the sequence of Archer’s murder that
evening, ‘ that evening ’ being precisely what is signified in the gap
between the two) - held ‘ outside the disjunction fades into the
illusion of coincidence.

The figures (I and II) give the formal pattern of the section in its
movement of alternation, the approach via analysis into autono-
mous segments (the perspective of that analysis) proposes certain
insights into the construction of the alternating movement; it
remains, within and against the terms of these descriptions, to
demonstrate fully the interplay of systems at work over that con-
struction. The demonstration will be done as a commentary on
the beginning of the film, segment by segment, after the segmenta-
tion used in the two figures, which has at least the virtue of con-
venience and easy intelligibility. At this level of the analysis, move-

^ merit and systems can be seen to divide up the text in a plurality 35
of ways; the relative arbitrariness of the segmentation adopted is
therefore unavoidable and not to be regretted. As for the notion of
‘ commentary it is the record of an attention to the filmic system;
its notations are from within the scope of that attention and are
in no sense a claim to list ‘ everything ’ in the t%venty-seven seg-
ments the section comprises. The notations are arranged under
headings, but these headings are a function of the arrangement
rather than a rigorous — and rigid -set of distinctions; where film
and ease of presentation demand, they will occasionally be allowed
to melt into one another.

1. Description: An unbroken shot, lasting for some two and a
half minutes, which moves from a close-up of a man holding a
bomb, his hand regulating the dial mechanism, to the planting of
the bomb in the boot of a car, and from there to a long track
backing in front of the car as it drives through the crowded streets
of a town (title and credits are shown over during the car’s pro-
gress). coming to a stop at a customs post; here the camera holds
a conversation between the ftvo occupants of the car, a couple on •
foot and a customs official, keeping the couple in frame when the
car leaves over the border (Figure III). Narrative: The planting of
the bomb followed by the suspense of the car’s journey until the
explosion heard off at the end of the segment, the suspense being
created by a variety of means across the range of matters of ex-
pression - length of shot, tracking ahead of car, rhythmic insistence
of the music, dialogue (woman passenger: ‘Hey! I’ve got this
ticking noise in my head ’), etc. This effectively enclosed action
also poses clearly the term of its potential development, the enigma
of the identity of the killer and thus of his motive (who? why?).

The close-up on which the shot opens shows only the trunk and
arms of the man with the bomb and when the whole of his body
is seen it is impossible to fix his face (this remains true even when
the individual frames are examined on a viewing-machine).
Character: The conversation at the customs post permits the intro-
duction of four important characters (t\vo are important by their
immediate death, which is the' premiss of the narrative and the
coefficient of the filmic operation - its movement and displacement;
two are protagonists in the narrative and factors in that opera-
tion): the t^vo passengers, first seen as they leave a night-club and
walk to the car while the bomb is being planted, are Rudy Linneker,
middle-aged, apparently prosperous (car. manner), and an unnamed
woman, blonde, youngish, visibly not his wife (speech, ^manner,
dress, genre conventions); the couple on foot, first seen during the
car’s drive through the town, are Vargas, treated as a celebrity for
just having smashed a drugs racket, and Susan, his wife. An
atmosphere of gaiety is stressed - the carnival air of the crowded
streets, the joking at the customs post, Vargas and Susan out for
a stroll on their honeymoon, Vargas ‘ hot on the trail of a choco-

36 late soda for my wife The relationship man-wife is heavily under-
lined and marked with surprise: Vargas ‘ my wife V Official
‘ Your what! ? V Susan “ Yeah, you’re right, Officerl ’ (note, indeed,
the ambiguity of Susan’s response): the end of the segment, more-
over, is the interruption of the seal of union: (V and S in medium
close-up about to embrace) S * Mike, do you realise this* is the
very first time we’ve been together in my country? ’/ V ‘ Do you

RGUREIIl

realise I haven’t kissed you for over an hour? ’/ Explosion. Parti-
tions: The segment situates the locus of the action as a border-
town, both on image - the customs post - and sound - the dialogue
concerning customs formalities - tracks. In addition, emphasis is
placed on nationality: Linneker and Susan are American, Vargas
and the blonde are Mexican. Exchange: The elements of partition
at once become terms of exchange: Mexican/American ; : Mexican/

American or Vargas/Susan ; : Blonde/Linneker: Vargas is to Susan 37
as Linneker to the blonde, therefore if Linneker is tom to bits in
the explosion, Vargas must be torn from Susan by the force of
contagion; Susan is to Vargas as the girl to Linneker. the other-
the foreigner - to the man, therefore if the girl is an explosive
sexuality that kills Linneker (by metonymy — the very motion -of
desire), Susan is an uncontrollable demand from which Vargas must
separate himself in order to maintain his position (narratively, the
split between Vargas as husband and Vargas as official with the
Mexican government). This process of exchange is given as the
organisation of the segment: the tracking - for the most part in
high angle -lays out the town (spatial definition of the constant
motif of ‘ crossing the border ’) and. in so doing, picks up Susan
and Vargas as they walk through the streets to create a choreo-
graphy of alternation - overtaking/being overtaken — between them
and the car, forced to go slowly because of the crowd. Thus the
partitions, nationality and border, are brought together filmic-
ally into a composite figure that plays across the action. Reper-
cussions: The segment depends on an extreme mobility of the
camera, not simply in distance covered (the long track) but also
in variation of shot angle: at the moment of the bomb plant, the
camera pulls up into a high angle shot that looks down on the car,
the angle then being reduced to the horizontal towards the end of
the car’s progress. This is the setting off of a series of modulations
which form a number of systems at different levels of the film;
here, for instance, deciding the extreme mobility (up and down)
of the final segment (IV f). the ‘ answer ’ to this one and thereby
the binding of the discourse in a circle of accomplishment and
resolution. ‘ Repercussions ’ is merely a heading for the notation
of such structural elements however manifested, elements which
repercute over the film, scoring it, pushing with and against the
narrative, according and fluctuating the discourse. It is the inter-
locking of these elements with the figures of exchange (which they
help define) to hold the levels together in a sliding, since over-
determined. coherence that produces the pleasure of the film, and
its system. Light: Night-time; -oscillation of light and dark during
segment according to the stages of the car’s journey through the
town. Music: Brass and saxophone theme, ominously deep-toned,
with an insistent bongoish rhythm vaguely ‘ Mexican ‘ Author
The opening of Touch of Evil with its ‘ extraordinary ’ tracking
shot has become a famous point of reference in ‘ film culture ’ and
the ‘ breathtaking achievement * it represents is one element
among many others which can be systematised in reading as the
signature * Orson Welles the style of the author. (Welles, of
course, entered Hollywood exactly as ‘ the author *; that is the
meaning of the terms of the contract with RKO in 1939.) The sole
interest here is in the author as an effect of the text and only in
so far as the effect is significant in the production of the filmic

38 system, is a textual effect. The present heading was introduced to
allow this to be made clear from the outset of the commentary.

2.1 Description: Cut from Susan and Vargas about to embrace
' at the end of i. to a shot of the car exploding, then back to their

reaction; they begin to run in towards the explosion with the
camera tracking back and there follows an ‘ account ’ of the con-
fusion of the scene handled in a small number of shots (6, joined
by cuts). Narrative: Vargas sends Susan back to their hotel and
involves himself in the scene of the explosion. Character:
Introduction of Schwartz who describes himself as an official
in the District Attorney’s service; Vargas’ importance and
responsibility are shown - in short, his ‘ position ’. Partitions:
Vargas’ nationality is marked (he speaks in Spanish) and the
figure traced by the movement of i. is recapitulated in a dia-
logue that also stresses the enigma of the explosion; Detective
‘ That bomb came from the Mexican side of the border ’/
Vargas ‘ The car did *. Exchange: The kiss is interrupted, the
honeymoon postponed (‘ We’ll have to postpone that chocolate
soda. I’m afraid’); involved in the explosion, Vargas sends Susan
away, back over the border: V ‘ This could be very bad for us ’/
S ‘ For us? ’/ V ‘ For Mexico. I mean ’. The ambiguity of the in-
volvement is evident: official, Vargas, is caught up in the explo-
sion; husband, he is touched by its contagion. Repercussions: The
sound off at the close of i. carries over into this segment, links
kiss and explosion, as too does movement in frame: from Vargas
bending down towards Susan’s lips to the car flying up in the air.
The shot of the explosion is brutal: seen in long shot with the
camera static, the car goes up, bursting into flames, and comes
down, at which point the camera zooms in on the blazing wreckage
(in the space of two or three seconds); this giving a kind of accen-
tuated cadence of violence -car up/camera static/ /car static/
camera in. Emphasis on the violence is continued in the film (in
this section: 2.3 DA ‘ An hour ago Rudy Linneker had this town in
his pocket ’/ Doctor ‘ Now you can strain him through a sieve ’;
and beyond: II e Quinlan ‘ An old lady on Main Street last m'ght
picked up a shoe - the shoe had a foot in it ’). but, more crucially,
violence is also the overbalance of the narrative: the answer to the
explosion is the discovery not of its perpetrator but of its detona-
tor, of the ‘ fault ’ - the blonde (or) Susan. Light: Night-time;
flames and headlights. Music: None.

3.2 Description: Cut to Susan making her way back through
the streets and accosted by Pancho with a note (‘ Follow this boy
at once - he has something very important for Mr Vargas ’); handled
in three shots. Narrative: The segment begins the Grandi aggres-
sions against Susan (and Vargas): closing on Susan’s decision to
follow Pancho. it dispatches the narrative sharply forward (what
will happen?). Character: Introduction of Pancho, marked with
‘ Mexican-ness ’ and a certain foreboding of sensuality (pose.

maimer, expression, leather jacket, insouciance, Susan’s reaction); 39
Susan manifests a kind of exasperated determination and a sense
of repartee. Partitions: Pancho is Mexican to Susan as American
(Pancho speaks Spanish and bystanders interpret between the two);

Susan has crossed back into Mexico, Pancho will lead her over the
border again into America (S * Across the border again? !. ’).
Exchange: Pancho is. to Susan as Vargas is to Susan, Mexican to
American; the walk through the town and over the border taken
by Vargas and Susan in 1., is now to be taken by Pancho and
Susan. If Pancho is a ‘ boy ’ (‘ Pancho indeed, is a slighting nick-
name given by Susan), Susan ‘ nevertheless ’ takes the encounter
as sexual (once away from Vargas, all Susan’s encounters are sexual
incidents); whence a layer of divisions: to follow Pancho is to
follow Vargas (‘ something very important for Vargas ’) but to
follow Pancho is to lose -or to abandon - Vargas by the fact of
the substitution, putting Pancho in the place of desire (S ‘ What
have I got to lose? Don’t answer that 1 ’); thus, on the one hand
Susan goes with Pancho, on the other she invokes the image of
Vargas as husband-official (the official position of her sexuality) -
but this is precisely what separates her, narratively and symbolic-
ally, from Vargas: Bystander ‘ Lady, he says you don’t understand
what he wants ’/ S ‘ I understand very well what he W’ants. . . . Tell
him I’m a married woman and my husband is a great big official in
the government ready and willing to knock out all those pretty
front teeth of his ’. Names: Pancho, a main character, has no
name throughout the film other than the nickname of his relation
with Susan (unnameable, he is a mixture - Vargas, in 3.8, ‘ This . . .
this “ kid ” (word spoken wth difficulty), what did he want? ’).

In the novel Badge of Evil, Vargas is called Holt and there is no
equivalent to Pancho (apart from the basic elements of the conflict
between official and crooked policeman, novel and film have little
in common). Where does the name ‘ Vargas ’ come from? From
Pancho, as though to confirm the exchange: the actor Valentin de
Vargas. Repercussions: The series of scenes that play out the
Susan-Pancho encounter, terminating in the half-rape in the motel
(III 1 ); the return of the narrative and the position of Vargas: in
IV c he does knock out Pancho’s teeth. Light: Night-time;
brightly lit streets. Music: ‘ Mexican ’ theme (different to 1.),
insistent bongoish rhythm.

2.3 Description: Cut to the scene of the explosion; in some
eleven shots (fixed and moving, near and general) the confusion is
described as first the DA then Marcia Linneker arrive; the twelfth
shot marks the entry of Quinlan and what follows is dominated
by the tension of his dialogue with Vargas, mostly in shot/reverse
shot. Narrative: The start of the investigation into the explosion
and thus of the conflict between Quinlan and Vargas. Character:
Introduction of the DA (Adair), Marcia Linneker, Sergeant Pete
Menzies (shown as Quinlan’s righthand man). Chief Gould and,

40 most notably. Hank Quinlan. The segment is centred on Quinlan’s
arrival, which constitutes an event both for the narrative (the
investigation) and, so to speak, for itself - Quinlan’s * character ’
is an event. Everything works towards this centring: the wait
for Quinlan (he is the last on the scene), the terms of the antici-
pation of his arrival (DA ‘ Well here comes Hank at last- Vargas,
you’ve heard of Hank Quinlan, our local police celebrity? ’/ V ‘ I’d
like to meet him ’/ Doctor ‘ That’s what you think ’), the presenta-
tion of the final entry (after the eleven shots of confusion, there
is a sudden moment of stillness as, framed alone in low angle,
Quinlan throws open his car door, pauses and climbs out). Quin-
lan’s appearance is shabby and slovenly (his dress contrasts with
Vargas’ suit and the DA’s dinner jacket - Quinlan ‘ Well, what do
you knowl the DA in a monkey suitl ’); the shot of him getting
out of the car emphasises his cigar and his cane; he moves with
difficulty because of his immense bulk (his flesh is constantly
stressed in close shots, here and in the rest of the film) and walks
with a limp (his ‘ game leg ’; explained to Vargas as the source of
his ‘ intuition its twinges ‘talk’ to him). Partitions: Quinlan
is American, Vargas Mexican: this is Quinlan’s opposition — ‘ I hear
you even invited some kind of a Mexican ‘ You don’t talk like
one - a Mexican, I mean ’ - and the response is to clarify Vargas’
status - DA ‘ I don’t think Mr Vargas claims any kind of juris-
diction ’; V * I’m merely what the United Nations would call an
observer ’. At one point, however, Vargas is framed alone against
a poster reading ‘ Welcome Stranger! to picturesque Los Robles the
Paris of the Border ’ and the end of the segment is straight con-
flict between Vargas and Quinlan, each singled out in turn in near
close up/close up as in the last two shots: V ‘ Captain, you won’t
have any trouble with me ’/ Q ‘ You bet your sweet life I won’t
Repercussions: Having identified her father’s body, Marcia refuses
to look at the woman who was with him - ‘ I’m not acquainted with
my father’s girlfriends The response and disdain (but what is
Marcia’s position?) confirm the sexuality (Quinlan in this same
segment talks of ‘ some jane, some strip-teaser ’), mark the bad
object, and that object is erased from the screen, in and from the
diegetic space; the characters facing the camera in near close shot
look down but the bodies are never seen; unless it be to place us
in the reflection of violence: a low angle shot shows the Doctor
crouching and bending forward (‘ now you can strain him through a
sieve ’) with a group of onlookers behind - we are in the impossible
position, the object is the loss of position, of point of view, our
death./ The initial low angle shot of Quinlan inaugurates a series
that combines shot angle and narrative meaning in an easy
evidence: dominating, Quinlan is not seen in high angle until the
turning point of the. deal with Grandi (III d; Still 19) and then at
the beginning of the end, the exit from Tanya’s to the final show-
down (IV e; Still 55). This system, be it noted, is a partial system:

it forms a whole but does not circumscribe all the low angle effects
in the text (which could be systematised, for example, with regard
to the signature ‘ Welles ’). Light: Night-time; light from head-
lights, etc. Music: None. ‘ Author ’: Quinlan’s arrival exceeds the
diegetic space; it is prepared as ‘ a great moment of cinema ’, a
star turn -the colossal entry of Quinlan-Welles, Doubled with
effects of style (shot angles, distortions, framing), by the signature,
it marks a circulation and a division: actor- director; of interest
if it signifies in the system as a problem of position.

3.4 Description: Cut to Susan arriving at a hotel with Pancho;
inside, the meeting with Grandi: variations on shot/reverse shot.
Narrative: Begun in 3.2. the first of the Grandi aggressions crystal-
lises in the behaviour towards Susan and the vague menaces
(‘ advice ’) transmitted through her to Vargas. Character: Intro-
duction of Unde Joe Grandi. brother of the Grandi whose drug
racket has been smashed by Vargas. Partitions: Grandi speaks
Spanish with Pancho. has difficulty in following Susan’s rapid
delivery, is endowed with ‘ Mexican-ness ’ in his appearance; at
the same time, he is an American citizen and declares that his
name ‘ ain’t Mexican ’. Like Pancho, he is a mixture, and the idea
of the Grandi ‘ family ’ stresses this (‘ some of us in Mexico, some
of us on this side’). Exchange: As Susan and Pancho arrive at
the hotel, camera tracking with them in dose medium-shot, Susan
is called from off (‘Hey lady! ’); while she turns, there is a cut
to a fixed shot of a Mexican woman holding up a baby; cut back
to a medium shot of Susan standing in the hotel entrance with
Pancho and smiling towards the woman off (towards the camera) -
suddenly they are illuminated by the light from a flash-bulb. In this
brief inddent Susan is thus tricked into having her photo taken
and the narrative expectation is clearly that some form of black-
mail is in preparation. The expectation, however, is not to be
fulfilled, the incident comes to nothing; what remains of it - what
determined it? - is predsely this image, the photograph: Pancho
for Vargas, here is Susan’s honeymoon snap (outside the hotel),
with the baby as mediation. Names: The segment indicates that
* Pancho ’ is a nickname, and an insult: Grandi * Why you call him
Pancho? ’/ Susan * For laughs, I guess ’. Against the nickname,
Susan places heavy emphasis on ‘ Mike ‘ my husband ’, ‘ Mr
Vargas ’./ It should also be noted that the name ‘ Grandi ’ is some-
times spelt ’ Grande ’ by Welles critics; the film provides no clear
way of dedding and all that is important is its ‘ foreign-ness ’, its
(ironical) semantic possibility of ‘ bigness ’, its translation into such
‘ jokes ’ as ‘ Grandi’s Rancho Grande ‘ (the name of Uncle Joe’s
night-club cum strip-joint), its ‘ mixedness ’ (‘ the name ain’t
Mexican ’). Repercussions: The scene in the hotel is crucial over the
whole of the film: the composition within the frame, for instance,
turning Susan and Grandi in patterns of domination with Pancho
as a kind of ‘ floater *, is the beginning of a series of systems and

42 partial systems which themselves become supports in various
chains of substitution and exchange. Central in this respect, men-
tioned now simply for later reference, is the shot of Grandi in
medium shot on the left-hand side of the frame cocking his gun
across Susan standing back from him facing the camera, %vith
Pancho off in the position of the camera (in our position), -almost
mirrored in frame in a mirror behind Susan. An early shot of
Grandi shows him knotting his tie in that same mirror with Susan
coming up behind him; the last shot of Grandi (IV b) has him
hanging over Susan in mirror image, strangled tvith her stocking./
The menace with the gun is also the menace with the large cigar
Grandi smokes (close-ups show Grandi and Susan together with
the cigar a kind of trait pointed at her); the cigar joins Grandi and
Quinlan and both aggress Susan, but Grandi is small, as much
dominated by Susan as dominating her; by being Quinlan, he can
have Susan, but in this way he is Susan to Quinlan: once again,
a mixture./ There are no children in the film; the baby held up to
Susan posing with Pancho in Vargas’ place has its answer, how-
ever, in II d: crossing the street to phone Susan, held by Pancho
in the motel, Vargas’ path intersects that of a woman pushing a
pram; image twice over of his displacement, Vargas sees nothing
(at the moment of the intersection he puts on dark glasses)
and he enters the blind woman’s shop to reject the image - the
film-photo — of Susan’s desire./ During the conversation with Grandi
Susan comments: ‘ You know what’s wrong \vith you, Mr Grandi?
you’ve been seeing too many gangster movies ’. In one sense, the
classic analysis applies: the reference to film in the film draws
attention to the film at the same time as it confirms its illusion
(one might equally consider in this context perhaps the reverse
deep focus/flattening effects of the shots into the mirror in the
segment); in another, that analysis misses the point: the reference
misfits the attention-confirmation mould because of its literal
truth - this is not a gangster movie, which is its problem, the
running down of the narrative from here until the halt in the scene
that contains the only other vocally declared reference to the
movies: the scene in Tanya’s, the other side of the illusion. Light:
Night-time; illumination of the flash-bulb, inside the hotel the con-
stant effect of a neon sign outside flicking on and off. Music: Din
of music in the street, as though from nearby bar; heard more or
less distantly throughout the conversation inside.

2.5 Description: Cut from Susan leaving the hotel to Quinlan
leading a group of men through the town streets; one shot with
tracking movement. Narrative: The investigation gets underway.
Partitions: Quinlan has crossed over into Mexico - DA * Quinlan,
we just can’t cross over into Mexico like this! ’; ‘ This is Mexican
territory, what can we do? ’ — and is repeating in reverse the car’s
passage in 1. The jurisdiction - Quinlan or Vargas - thus changes;
at the end of the segment Menzies turns to ask Vargas whether

there is any objection to them asking a few questions. Exchange:
As Menzies turns, he finds that Vargas is missing; Vargas has left
the group (though he is never actually seen in it) to rejoin Susan,
inaugurating thereby that mediation between the alternating narra-
tive strands previously discussed. Repercussions: Quinlan is on
his way to the strip-joint for information concerning the woman
killed with Linneker; seen as the men go up the main street, a
hoarding can be distinguished above the entrance reading ‘ 20
sizzling strippers the words operate a condensation over different
matters of expression: Rudy Linneker goes up in flames with a
sizzling stripper (sexuality explodes) and the rhythm of the shot
of the explosion comes back as the dance of the accentuation of
the body, the zoom in of the fasdnated gaze, and the horrified
effacement — burning, the stripper herself must be burnt, wiped out,
placed outside, the position of death./ Emphasis on Quinlan’s cane
as he is seen walking along. Light: Night-time; the crowds have
gone, open streets, a few signs and doorways lit up. Music:
None.

3.6 Description: Cut to Vargas opening the door into the hotel
lobby to greet Susan; one shot, slight movement follotving Vargas
inside. Narrative: Vargas joins Susan who starts to relate her
adventure. Light: Night-time; interior lighting- Music: None.

2.7 Description: Cut to Menzies and the others in the street,
still looking off towards Vargas and Susan (the hotel is glass-
fronted); Quinlan, who has been some way ahead of the group, also
comes back to look; one shot. Narrative: The narrative content
has already been given in the description; the segment functions
as an element of the alternation (in future when description and
narrative fold together without need for further commentary, the
heading ‘ narrative ’ will simply be omitted). Partitions: Told
that the woman is Vargas’ wife, Quinlan adds; ‘ Well what do you
knowl She don’t look Mexican either ’. Exchange: If Susan does
not look Mexican, what does she look like? For Quinlan, there is
no doubt: she is a ‘jane’, no different to the stripper (2.3); so
she too will have to be wiped out. Light and Music: As 2.5.

3.8 Description: Cut to Vargas and Susan in the hotel lobby;
their conversation is followed until a cut to show them from out-
side through the glass fronting and to take in the entry of a youth
who waits out of their sight; as Vargas leaves and begins to cross
the street into camera, there is a tracking movement backwards
to hold Vargas and the youth coming after him. Narrative: Susan
has been telling Vargas of her encounter with Pancho and Grand!
and is arguing with him about whether or not they should stay in
Los Robles. The start of the second Grand! aggression. Character:
Tension between Vargas and Susan. In fact, this tension plays across
and into the terms of partition and exchange: divided from his
American wfe by the explosion, Vargas, the Mexican official, split
between his official position and his position as husband, now

44 uses both positions to maintain the division: V ‘ I can’t just walk
away from all this. . . .’/ S ‘ Of coursel Even on his honeymoon,
the Chairman of the Pan-American Narcotics Commission has a
sacred duty to perform! V V ‘ Suzy. you know it’s more than just
a high-sounding title, now they’re pushing my wife around! ’/
S ‘ Can’t we forget about that? ’ The position must be safe-
guarded - restored •- at all costs, both Vargas’s and Susans. Light:
Night-time; lit interior, street with lighting from hotel. Music:
None:

2.9 Description: Cut to Quinlan and his men seen from behind

3.10 in near shot about to enter the strip-joint from the back

2.11 way; cut to Vargas turning along a wall to catch them
up; as he does so, a voice olf calls him and there follows a con-
frontation with the youth in a brief shot/reverse shot alternation
ending in a struggle which itself ends with the youth breaking
away and Vargas returning, rejoining Menzies and exiting as though
to catch up Quinlan again. Narrative: The three segments are
taken together because of their rapidity of succession and their
homogeneity; Vargas, as it were, quickly crosses from one strand
to the other and then back; the investigation continues its first
stage and the second Grandi aggression is completed. Character:
Introduction of Risto, the youth (named only in 3B. 15)4 a younger
version of Pancho, but more nervous and less overtly sensual. Re-
percussions: In 3.4 Susan is called by a voice off and has her photo
taken with Pancho; here Vargas is called by a voice off and has
vitriol thrown at him by another Pancho (from the same * family ’).
The terms of the repercussion are those of part of a spiral of
exchange./ In the struggle, the vitriol misses Vargas and splashes
over a poster advertising the main attraction in the strip- joint,
Zita; as segment 2.12 makes clear, Zata is the woman with Linneker
in the explosion: thus, for a second time, the sizzling stripper is
herself destroyed, burnt by the vitriol which sizzles on the sound-
track while the image of Zita is held blackened and smoking in
near shot. The spiral of exchange comes round again: Susan
is always potentially interchangeable with Zita, a mirror image
(S to Z; for Vargas, she is -always SuZy), and the problem then is
to destroy that image, her image - narratively, by framing her for
murder; symbolically, but this is more difficult and the difficulty is
the systematic movement of the film, by wiping her out, like Zita./
Entering the back way, Quinlan comments: * The key to this whole
thing’s the dynamite; the killer didn’t just want Linneker dead, he
wanted him destroyed, annihilated ’. The comment is narratively
proleptic - the whole ‘ thing ’ of the action of the framing of
Sanchez hinges on two sticks of dynamite - but at the same time
paralipsistic - attention is fixed on the annihilation; the motive of
the killer is a feint,- as the narrative recognises by providing no
answer to the comment in those terms. Light: Night-time; modu-
lations of dark - street - and light - back entrance. Music: ‘ Mod-

emish ’ - colourless - vibraphone theme coming from inside strip- 45
joint.

2.12 Description: Cut to inside strip-joint, sequence-shot of
Quinlan’s progress through the place and his brief questioning of
the ‘ Madame cut to Quinlan and his men coming out into the
street; as they come across, a pianola is heard and, after an insert
shot of the pianola playing, Quinlan makes his way towards the
source of the sound; cut to him opening the door; there then
follows the scene between him and Tanya. Narrative: The first
stage of the investigation is completed (Quinlan learns nothing) and
the narrative then seems to run down. Character: Introduction of
the ‘ Madame ’ (the sole and brief appearance of Zsa Zsa Gabor)
and of Tanya. (This segment is analysed in detail below.)

3.13 Description: Cut to a high angle shot of Vargas crossing
the street in the direction of his hotel; the camera moves rapidly
upwards and to the left, briefly glimpsing an open window through
which a torch is being shone, until a cut fixes the wndow opposite
and Susan, changing clothes in her hotel room, caught in the beam;
the confrontation that follows is treated in variations of shot/
reverse shot across the axis of the torch beam. Narrative: The
man with the torch is Pancho and this is thus the third Grandi
aggression. Exchange: Interposed between Vargas and Susan,
Pancho fixes her as the stripper: framed in the spotlight on the
window-stage (Still 12), Susan exits arid the light continues to play
tantalisingly over the empty space, awaiting her re-entry (Still 13)
which comes with a provocative acceptance of the role - ‘ See any
better this way? * (Susan putting herself in the beam); as she
finishes dressing, she comments: ‘ You can turn it off now, buster,
you’re wasting your battery! ’ Repercussions: (Light) The filmic
system depends constantly on light as a material for the realisation
of significance, for the realisation of a number of systems and
partial systems. This segment witnesses, so to speak, the material-
isation of that dependence and mobilises those systems, pulls them
into activity. Susan is here attacked by light as earlier (3.4) she
had been held by Pancho and Uncle Joe in the alternating rhythm
of the neon sign: the first ’attack is gentle (the rhythm is not
insistent, the effect of the alternation is muted), the second is
direct, the illumination of Susan from the distance of the look,
gaze and object defined by the rod of light; Zita/Susan - the body
imaged and ‘ looked ’ (nothing happens to Susan in the narrative
finally except that Pancho looks: Still 27). Zita, however, is herself
alight, ‘ sizzling ’: between the two attacks on Susan, her image
is destroyed, blackened; in the rod of light, Susan plays Zita’s
part and turns it round in the assumption of its desire, breaks the
distance - unscrewing the light bulb in her room, Susan hurls it
across at Pancho - and plunges everything into darkness. In short,
from explosion to darkness, a confusion produces a range of figures
of light, and for that confusion, the position of Susan (object?

J ^6 subject?), the system knows only two solutions, illumination or
extinction; otherwise, there is only an empty margin - the black-
ness edging the circle of light; the moment of the hand on the
light bulb. Music: Dramatic scoring: ominous motif on initial
shot of Vargas, bongo rhythm takes over with loud insistence -
orchestra (saxophone meandering) behind from time to time - and
comes to a climax as the light bulb crashes on the floor of Pancho’s
room.

3A.14 Description: Cut as the crash is heard to Vargas opening
the door into Susan’s room; then four shots for their conversation,
ending with their exit. Narrative: Tension between Vargas and
Susan. Repercussions: (Light) The whole of the brief exchange
betiveen the two centres on the question of the light. Vargas enters
the darkness and light floods in from the hall corridor; V * Suzy.
What are you doing here in the dark? V S ‘ There isn’t any shade
on the window */ V ‘ Well, can we turn the light on now? ’/ S ‘ No,
we can’t ’/ V ‘ Why not? ’/ S (exasperated) ‘ Because there isn’t
any bulb any more ’/ V ‘ Suzy . . . ’; she cuts across him and he
follows her out, the door slamming black. Tightly constructed, the
scene turns round from the previous segment; the bulb flung at
Pancho hits Vargas too (the sound of the crash merges onto the
cut) and the shot/reverse shot alternation along the tod of the
torch beam is repeated in four shots on the line of the dialogue
about the light; the closing darkness of the one becomes the begin-
ning of the other which itself ends in darkness again; Pancho
establishes Susan as Zita, Vargas wants her as Suzy (he uses the
name as an argument — as, precisely, a position). Music: None.

3B.15 Description: Cut to Pancho who, looking down from his
window, catches Risto in the street below in his torch beam; Risto
runs off and there is a chase through the empty streets until he is
finally brought to a halt by Uncle Joe and helpers; eight shots
with a variety of movements and angles. Narrative: Dissension in
the Grandi family; Risto bolts because Uncle Joe is angry at the
vitriol attack which had not received his authorisation. This dis-
sension. however, has no narrative consequences, being exhausted
in this segment and its continuation in 3B.17. Partitions: The
dissension serves to emphasise the fact of the Grandi family, its
ramifications - Risto is Uncle Joe’s nephew, the son of his brother
(the Grandi arrested thanks to Vargas) - and, once more, its mixed-
ness“is Risto Mexican or American? Exchange: Risto ’s sole
action in the film is the throwing of the vitriol. Motive? Obviously
(deducing from the premisses of common sense psychology) revenge
for the arrest of his father; but what Risto says (in 3B.17) is that
he wanted to give Vargas and Susan something to think about on
their honeymoon. As Pancho spotlights Susan, so Risto destroys
Zita’s image — for Vargas? for Susan? Repercussions: During the
scuffle with Risto. Uncle Joe loses his toupee (his ‘ rug ’) and this
is stressed again in 3B.17. The ‘ comedy ’ of Uncle Joe’s person is

a focus on a mixed body, male and female, and this focus, and
hence the loss of the hair-piece, is to be climaxed in the scene of
his strangulation by Quinlan (IV a). Light: Night-time; streets,
sky clearing at end. Music: None.

3A.16 Description: Cut to Susan and Vargas coming downstairs
in the hotel; Vargas is called to the telephone in the lobby; ’three
shots, of which the last is a close medium shot of Vargas taking
the call. Narrative: Tension continues between Vargas and Susan.
Partitions: V ‘ This isn’t the teal Mexico, you know that; all border
towns bring out the worst in a country, you know that ’. Reper-
cussions: While on the phone, Vargas opens his briefcase and checks
his gun; the visual stress on this action is a preparation for its
answering correspondence, the scene at the motel when he will
open his case and find the gun missing (III n). A more classic
example of practicability - preparation, fulfilment, hence exhaustion
- w^ould be difficult to imagine; but the instance is more than this:
metonymically, the checking of the gun is the verification of Susan
(the gun is Vargas’ position) and its loss is then, exactly, the loss
of Susan; the gun becomes a factor in the circulating exchange./
The telephone call has a narrative function (it concerns the investi-
gation) and it fits, over this, into a series that, also, has its force
in the movements of exchange (connection/disconnection). Light:
Lit interior. Music: None.

3B.17 Description: Cut to the street where the quarrel between
Uncle Joe and Risto is in full swing; Uncle Joe turns to look off.
Narrative: The end of the Risto incident. (For the rest, see com-
mentary at 3B.15.)

3A.18 Description: Cut, as Uncle Joe looks, to a very brief long
shot of Susan and Vargas seen across the street just inside the
hotel entrance. Light: Early morning, bet^veen night and day.
Music: None.

3B.ig Description: Cut to Uncle Joe who sends a nephew over
to Susan with an envelope; brief shot across to the hotel as the
nephew leaves on his errand. Narrative: The dispatch of the
letter. Exchange: As Quinlan in 2.7, so Grandi, in the same posi-
tion, catches Susan in his’ look. Light: Early morning, between
night and day. Music: None.

3A.20 Description: Cut to Susan in the hotel lobby; she comes
out to receive the envelope and opens it; explanatory insert, the
words ‘ A souvenir with a million kisses - Pancho ’ on the back of
the photo taken in 3.4. Narrative: The delivery of the letter and
the ‘ completion ’ of the action it involves, since narratively nothing
comes of it. Exchange: The close-up of the photo developed con-
firms the framing of Susan and Pancho for us (in the position of
the camera) in 3.4. Repercussions: In 3.2. Susan was given a
letter concerning Pancho; here, she is given a photo-note from
Pancho; the chain continues, and breaks: from Susan to image,
another chain has begun - the flash-bulb, the torch-beam . . .

48 Light: Lit interior; exterior dawn. Music: None.

3A.21 Cut to hotel entrance seen front on, Vargas coming out
3B.22 to rejoin Susan; cut to the hotel seen from across the
3A.23 street, Vargas and Susan cross to their car, movement in
3B.24 to them at the car; during the conversation that follows
3A.25 and ends with them driving off, two shots are 'inserted
3B.26 of Grandi watching, with Risto just behind him; after
the car leaves, three shots of Grandi getting in his car and driving
ofiE in the same direction ~ dissolve to establishing shot of the
motel. Narrative: These six segments are taken in a group as a
result of their coherence; they give the continuation of the tension
between Vargas and Susan, with the decision that the latter should
go to the motel, and of the Grandi aggressions, his exit after them.
Partitions: Vargas wants Susan to go back to Mexico City, she
wants to stay; S ‘ I’ll go to the motel V V ‘ What motel? ’/ S
‘ Well there must be one somewhere on the American side of the
border V V ‘ The American side of the border! V S * Well I’ll be
safer there and you won’t have to worry about me. Did I say the
wrong thing again? 1 V V ‘ No. I suppose it would be nice for a
man in my place to be able to think he could look after his own
wife in his own country ’; in every sense, the tension is that of
place. Exchange: How can Vargas keep Susan safe? He gives her
to Menzies (to Quinlan) to take to the American motel owned by
Grandi who owns the strip-joint which employed Zita who exploded
- economy and logic begin to turn together. Light: Dawn. Music:
None.

The preceding commentary, segment by segment, covers the begin-
m'ng of the film and allows the demonstration of the way in which
the narrative is initiated in the context of a number of systems and
partial systems, of an overmovement of actions and figures. Demon-
strating this, the commentary also enables us to come back to the
discussion of the very idea of the ‘ beginning ’ in relation to the
filmic system.

The habitual definition of that idea is made in connection with
the narrative and such a 'definition is ‘ structural * in so far as it
grasps the beginning by virtue of its position with regard to the
other elements of the whole (of, that is, precisely, the narrative
action); as Aristotle puts it: ‘A whole is that which has a begin-
ning, a middle and an end. A beginning is that which does not
necessarily follow anything else . . . ’ {Poetics, 1450b). In short, a
narrative action is a series of elements held in a relation of trans-
formation such that their consecution determines a state S' differ-
ent to an initial state S; thus: S-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-S'. Evidently,
the action includes S and S' (they are defined by it); and equally
evidently, the elements articulating - ‘ carrying ’ - the transforma-
tion are themselves ‘ little actions ’ with their own beginnings and
endings.

A beginning, therefore, is always a violence, the violation or
interruption of the homogeneity of S (the homogeneity - S itself -
being recogm'sed from the violence); in Touch of Evil, this is literal:
the explosion, the interruption of the long sequence-shot by the
abrupt brutality of the shot of the blazing car (car up/camera
static// car static/camera in). The narrative transformation is the
resolution of the violence, its containment - its replacing - in a new
homogeneity. ‘ Replacement ' there has a double edge: on the one
hand, the narrative produces something ne\v, replaces S with S';
on the other, this production is the return of the same. S' re-places
S, is the reinvestment of its elements. Hence the constraint of the
need for exhaustion: every element must be used up in the resolu-
tion; the dispersion the violence provoked must be turned into a
re-convergence - which is the action of the transformation, its
activity. Ideally, a narrative is the perfect symmetry of this move-
ment; the kiss the explosion postpones is resumed in the kiss of
the close as Susan is reunited with Vargas — the same kiss, but
delayed, narrativised.

There can be no question here of attempting a full study of the
history of narrative modes; it may, however, be simply suggested
that structurally a narrative depends inevitably on a process of
transformation but that the coherence of the transformation brings
into play levels of cultural/ideological determination. The presen-
tation above of that coherence in terms of symmetry and exhaus-
tion relied in fact, as the examples from Touch of Evil hinted, on a
conception of narrative derived from the novel and from classic
cinema as a form of the novel; a conception the crux of which is a
multiplication of elements in the name of a realism and the extreme
pressure of the demand for their unification into a sense, the
position of realism. It is on this position that hinges the ideological
and economic speculation in narrative (nineteenth century publish-
ing concerns and the novel, Hollywood and the film): the drama -
logic and economy of film and novel - is to maintain a violence, a
heterogeneity, from the position of the subject; the position of
realism is the position of intelligibility and the guarantee of intel-
ligibility is the stability of the subject, thus narrative, dispersion
and convergence, becomes the fiction of reality, the form of realism,
the separation in position of subject and process, or, since that pro-
cess for the subject is his division in the symbolic, the separation
in position of subject and discourse: the narrative must subsume at
once real and enunciation into a whole, the order of the subject.

The paradox of such a narrative is then this: aimed at contain-
ment. it restates heterogeneity as the constant term of its action -
if there is symmetry, there is dissymmetry, if there is resolution,
there is violence; it contains as one contains an enemy, holding
in place but defensively, and the strategic point is the implacable
disjunction of narrative and discourse, inonc6 and ^nonciation, the
impossibility of holding entirely on the subject-position of the one

the subject-process of the other which then endlessly returns against
the specular images of the whole, the clear punctuality of begin-
ning and end that blocks it more or less.

This is the involvement of Touch of Evil, its friction. The film
frames in an action meanings and images that come right in the
end, rather as Quinlan frames the criminal, but the framing holds
against a force - loss, waste, flow, displacement - that is the im-
possible problem of the narrative, the overturning which puts into
question the simple turn of the action, the finality of its passage
from beginning to end.

The beginning of Touch of Evil is obvious in its banality, sup-
ported as it is by the weight of genre expectation which indicates
straightaway the term of the end: murder — the enigma posed/
arrest - the enigma solved. Yet this beginning is also the interrup-
tion of two sexual relationships mirroring one another as the two
sides of a single image - right side: Vargas/Susan/position; wrong
side: Linneker/Zita/money; the body in place and the place of the
body. So long as the image coheres, one side can be passed for the
other: the enigma will be solved by the discovery that Linneker was
killed for his money by Sanchez sexually motivated by Marcia, Var-
gas and Susan thus being assured in their position as outside the
problems of money and sexuality; the sides, that is, are kept
intact, those problems contained in the narrative. What is cata-
strophic is confusion, mixture, exchange across the bar of the
image, the destniction of its coherence; from then on, the narra-
tive says more than it contains, producing as it were, the figures
of its distress. Thus Touch of Evil: the explosion starts an action
that is not that of the solution of the murder but that of the nature
of ‘ position * (Vargas/Quinlan), easy enough were it not for the
fact that the film continues with the initial image in an endless
deflection of the new action; the sides of the image apart, the
elements begin a pattern of exchange which poses, for instance,
the problem of the relations between position, money and sexuality
and to which the film can only reply by a kind of demonstration
of its panic. The filmic system of Touch of Evil is that panic, that
demonstration.

V

The purpose of the commentary was to show the way in which
the development of the narrative action, its initiation, is immedi-
ately the setting in motion, the constructidn, of a number of
systems that function as the figures of that action, supporting it or
displacing it. The drawback of such a commentary is its relative
crudeness, its enforced inattention to this dual operation in the
detail of the film, the particular movement of the segments. In
what follows an attempt is made to remedy this by looking care-

fully at one of the segments from the beginning section (2.12) and 51
then at its rhyming answer at the close of the film (IV e). The
choice of segment 2.12, moreover, was dependent on its gripping
together of systems and figures as a moment of loss, of narrative
waste.

As always, the difiiculty is that of presentation. The strategy
adopted in the present instance is draconian: the two segments
are tabled one after the other and a series of comments is given
in note form towards the reading of the tables. This, which is a
necessity of space, is also valid in itself: the writing of this part
of the analysis is nowhere if not in the tables and their reading.

Remarks

Time. There are various discrepancies between different copies
of the film; times given are approximate - what is important is
the exactitude of the proportionate length of the shots, the time
of their interrelation.

Camera movement. Where movement is very slight, a bar is
placed over the symbol M.

Shot scale. Once again, it is proportion that is important here
and the various standard terms are used relatively to the differen-
tiations of scale defined pertinently by the segments.

Character movement. This is essentially the presence within a
shot of a change of place by one or more characters, a trans-
ference - however minimal - of the bodily person. The minus sign
cancelled by an oblique stroke allows for the case of Vargas in
the second segment: extremely active on the scaffolding, Vargas
moves without really shifting his place.

Significant character look angle records schematically the play
of the direction of the ‘ look ’ of characters within a shot; the
significance wilt be discussed in relation to shot perspective, to the
systems they create between them; this and the following column
should thus be read in conjunction with one another.

Perspective position (vision). The symbols give the point of view
of the shot, N referring to a third person (narrative or neutral)
position: where narrative and character positions come together,
the character symbol is placed before the N (eg T/N); where the
narrative sees with a character position but from behind, the
character symbol is placed after (eg N/Q). The use of these sym-
bols, their systematic determinations, the whole question of point
of view and subjective vision will be discussed in detail at a later
stage of this analysis.

It should also be noted that all the shots are separated from
one another by simple cuts.

Table 1» 1 h (2.12) From strip>j6int to Tmya^s

52

53

1.27/0.02 Reverse shot. From the far corner of Tanya’s

(Still 7) parlour, over a table scattered with coins. Quinlan looking into

54

1.45/0.01 Tanya in close shot; she turns o(f right.

Characters: Tanya. F CU *i* Tanya into camera T Q/N

Dialogue; T ’ We’re dosed slightly left towards /

Quinlan off; then f
away.

55

56

27. 3.31/0.03 As 19. 21, 23, 25: Tanya moves ofi left into
camera, after Quinlan.

Characters; Tanya. F CU ■ BCU

DialoEOe; None.

Music: Pianola; 'Tanya’s time’.

58

0.12/0.06 Vargas and Menzies outside on the scaffold-
ing across the street from Tanya’s prepare
the bugging — Menzies is fitted up with
microphone and transmitting apparatus.
Characters; Vargas, Menzies.

59

6o

6i

63

64

Segment I h (2.12)

The segment balances over the movement from strip-joint to
Tanya’s, crossing the street from one to the other, building a series
of oppositions.

Treated in a long single shot, the scene in the strip-joint records
an action narratively pertinent (the search for information con-
cerning the woman killed in the explosion): broken into twenty-
three shots, the scene in Tanya’s refracts an inaction, the loss of
the ‘ narrative - what makes Quinlan enter is not at all the ex-
plosion but the pianola. The three shots separating them are the
progress of this loss, a kind of narrative running down: Shot 2 -
the exit into the street, the isolation of Quinlan as the camera
tracks in, his detachment from those following as he moves out of
the frame they are about to enter; Shot 3 - the brief (relative to
the two surrounding shots) punctuation of the pianola, the ‘ pull
inside which empties the film of action and character (the first
shot in the film in which objects appear undiegetically; as if to
stress this, the pianola is playing a^vay, itself its own momentum,
the keys going up and down), operates an enclosure (compare the
space of the street, the depth and area of the strip-joint); Shot 4 -
the playing out of the loss: opening on the emptiness of the street,
waste paper blowng across, it gives once more, in a lengtljy slow-
ness, the detachment of Quinlan, ends by isolating him in the arc
of the porchway entrance. ‘ We’re wasting our time around here,’
comments Quinlan in the strip-joint; in Tanya’s, time - the narra-
tive - peters out.

Strip-joint/Tanya’s. What is here described as a strip-joint (Zita’s
place of work - ‘ 20 sizzling strippers ’) is also described as cabaret
and night club; it is, in fact, ‘ Grandi’s Rancho Grande ’ and is the
scene of the deal between Grandi and Quinlan, as well as that of
Vargas’ furious attack on the Grandi boys at the end of the film
(III d, IV c); locale, therefore, of some of the major narrative events.
As the Madame (for want of a better word), Zsa Zsa Gabor is
literally the star: poised on the stairs, silver star gleaming beside
her, she is illuminated smoothly, theatrically, flawless. The final
moment of the shot frames her in this theatricality: accompanied
by her musicians, she stands flanked by Schwartz in the wings and
by the DA as stage-door johnny. The latter, indeed, spends most
of the shot verbally patting the girls; it is his world (the world of
‘ the girls ’), he is dressed for the part (the ‘ monkey suit ’), his
white shirt-front setting off the lustre of Gabor’s skin, her ‘ blonde-
ness *; ‘ Oh! I wouldn’t say that! he quickly interjects when
Quinlan talks of them wasting their time. Images of women domin-
ate (remember Zita’s outside), with Gabor as the climax. The
opening shows Quinlan next to a hostess dressed in a tight, low-
cut silk sheath: progressing up the bar, he passes two more
hostesses posed for inspection; then the picture of a woman
stretched smilingly, invitingly, over the arch that leads through

66 to the room beyond, her skirt up, pointing to Gabor coming down
the stairs. In tWs line of women (Still i), Gabor has only to play
, herself, the star, the image - Zsa Zsa.

Zsa Zsa. Susan. Zita. There are two roles for Susan; be Suzy for
Vargas, be Zita for Pancho; two roles, or the same role (the problem
is the explosion). The hostesses are images for Susan (the clothes
of the third are simply one step - the neckline - removed from hers
and in the motel she too will have her silk ‘ sheath '); filmically, she
is Zsa Zsa (imagine the lights gone down in the theatre of Still 3.
the beginning of the act, and then look at Still 12), the jubilation
of the look (the DA in Still 3) or its panic (the motel clerk in Still
15); which is to say that the narrative has only cinema - the dis-
tance of fetishism - as a knowledge of sexuality; Susan, character,
is Zsa Zsa. star, film image; Susan’s access to desire is thus the
passage of character to actress, to Janet Leigh star, pin-up (Still 18);
desire in position. We are in a kind of Mobius strip where the
narrative turns us from side to side in the single band of the
imaginary - the fiction of the film is the reality of the fiction of
cinema, the success of its institution.

Strip-joint/Tanya’s. One term alone can describe Tanya’s; it is
a maison close. The space of the strip-joint-cum-cabaret (length
of shot, distance travelled) gives way to the confined area of
Tanya’s, rooms elaborate with bric-a-brac, crowded with paintings
(as against the single image in the cabaret), lights shaded (contrast
the neon sign and the naked bulb in Still 3), ceilings, mirrors,
boxes, flower-stands. The opposition continues round the charac-
ters; Madame/Tanya, blonde/dark, match of skin and velvet into
a perfection carefully traced with jewellery/ impossible costume,
encumbered with ornament, hung with beads: as well as round
the music; the innocuous vibraphone/ the pianola tune. Here again,
the filmic reference is decisive; Dietrich, the world of Von Stern-
berg, of the past (Quinlan’s, and Welles’ - Follow the Boys in 1944);
house of dreams (Titawiu, Fairy Queen of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream).

Decisive but not exhaustive with regard to the consideration of
the functioning of Touch’ of Evil; what is important is the work
of this reference in the system of the film; Tanya is not simply
apart, she is also part of that system’s circulation (in the chain of
names, for instance; Zi — ta — nya).

Entering Tanya’s, Quinlan passes from film to film, from image
to mirror, action to inaction, and the narrative wastes. The ‘ time ’
of the scene in Tanya’s is not the past but disjunction: no image
fits -the whole scene crystallises on a difficulty of recognition:
instead the pictures multiply times in a ceaseless play of repetition
and difference (witness the duplication of character and picture in
Still 8) and point of view hesitates (the sense of Still 7 where we
take Tanya’s place as the absence of the recognition Quinlan seeks,
as the mirror of disjunction): the sexuality of the scenario -the

timbre of Dietrich, the chili, the shifting positions - against the 67
image of sexuality - Gabor on the stairs; and with Quinlan’s im-
potence as the turn of both, or Vargas’: Quinlan edged out in
Shot 1 (Still 3), immobilised from Shots 8 to 26 (Still 9); Vargas
vanished from the segment.

Segments 1 h (2.12) and IV e

Raymond Bellour has emphasised the way in which the construction
of progression in classic film depends on narrative units that are
symmetrically bound in a certain dissymmetry, regulated opposi-
tions between closure and openness (‘ The Obvious and the Code,’
Screen v 15 n 4, Winter 1974/5). This holds true for the two seg-
ments under present consideration and equally for their inter-
relation; from one end of the film to the other, they ‘ reply ’,
balance, overbalance.

Of equivalent length and shotage (3' 34", 27 shots/3' 02", 32
shots), the two segments occupy structural positions placing the
one as the reverse of the other, its rhyme. The movement of the
first is from the street through the cabaret into Tanya’s, the run-
ning down of the narrative; that of the second is from Tanya’s out
into the street, the restoration of the narrative.

The detail of this rhyming is given in the tabular descriptions of
the segments; suffice it to stress its beauty (beauty in classic film
is precisely the term of such regulation). What will here be noted
are the points of the dissymmetry, the repercussions in so far as
they figure the crisis of the system.

Running down/restoration. The scenes in Tanya's have no narra-
tive function; when Quinlan enters Tanya’s, he leaves the investiga-
tion; when he leaves Tanya’s, he enters the resolution of the
problem of the investigation. Between the two, there is one other
scene in Tanya’s, III k, sandwiched by the Grandi boys circling
round Susan in the motel and the final assault: Tanya is sitting
smoking in the pianola room, the phone rings off, she gets up
(Still 21); Menzies at the end of the line, trying to find Quinlan
(Still 22) ; Tanya in close-up in the hall, holding the phone, a hat
hanging on the peg beside her head, a man’s voice off calling for
her- T ‘Now Sergeant! ’/ Off ‘Tanya! Hey Tanya! ’/ T ‘ I’ll be
right there. . . . Now what would Hank Quinlan be doing here? ’/
M (over phone) ‘ Used to be his hole-up place . . . two or three
days with a case of whiskey ’/T ‘ That was years ago - now he’s
on candy bars ’; Menzies as previously— M ‘ Not tonight he isn’t
Tanya (Still 23), she puts the phone down, her dress is off her
shoulder, and exits in the direction of the voice, the shot hanging
on in the empty space with the hat (Still 24). It can be seen clearly
enough how this segment serves as mediation, switchpoint of the
exchange between the two main segments: the peg (Still 10) is
filled (Still 23); Tanya’s place (Still 21) passed to Quinlan (Still 39);

68 the candy bars of the one become the drink of the other over
Menzies’ ‘ Not tonight he isn’t etc. The crux is Menzies, who
dissolves into the start of the second of the main segments (com-
pare Stills 22 and 38: same position, same angle, same framing).
Where is Quinlan? Menzies seeks him with Tanya? for Tanya?
against Tanya? The construction of the first segment - the banking
of point of view (N, 3rd person; Q/N or T/N, from Quinlan or
from Tanya: N/Q, with Quinlan: examples of the four respectively
- Stills 4. 10, 9, 11) - is a scene of recognition (non-recognition)
and rejection; Quinlan’s place is a fantasy past and future, it has
no present. When Menzies phones, Quinlan cannot be there, the
place is taken (voice, hat); neither can the narrative, left hanging
in the air (Still 24). The way out for the narrative is to reinstate
position by debanking the blocking movement of point of view:
Menzies is the agent of this; and the process of the segment is
thus the unhooking of the vacancy of Shot 2 (Still 39): Quinlan
absent in Tanya’s place, the aporie once more of their conversation
(Shot 10 the definition of the impossibility; see the figure sketched
between Stills 7, 24, 45); from there the doubling by Menzies of
Quinlan (compare Stills 7 and 47); the relinearisation - T/N N/Q,
N/M-V- At the end of the line, Quinlan is pulled back into the
narrative (Shot 20 - Still 46 - is in this respect the reverse equiva-
lent to Shot 3 — Still 4 - of the first segment: Quinlan’s re-
connection; Menzies indeed talks of the need to get him away
from the pianola), back into the terms of the conflict with Vargas
where he can be killed for their resolution, the return of the image
(left behind in the strip-joint), the restitution of Susan as good
object, the end of the film.

VI

No film is more obvious than Touch of Evil: with a classic unity
of time and place, the action concentrates the struggle between
Vargas and Quinlan. The narrative causes no difficulty, it is the
context of a higher moral concern; the exploration of the relations
of law and justice and of the inevitable evil that results from their
divorce; ‘ Welles examines the price of illegitimate power, however
pure its motive ’ (J McBride; Orson Welles, London 1972, p 139).
It is this exploration which is crystallised by Vargas’ words to
Quinlan during the scene in the hotel room (III i): ‘A policeman’s
job is only easy in a police state - that’s the whole point. Captain.
Who’s the boss, the cop or the law? ’ The genius of the film is
then the demonstration of Vargas’ point in all its facets, the total
picture it gives: ‘ The camera creates a moral labyrinth in which
the characters must struggle, ironically unaware of the depth of
their dilemma * (McBride, op cit, p 13). Awareness, producing the

irony of the characters’ unawareness, is the position of the author 69
or of the spectator placed in that position; interpretation, the
mode of that awareness, focusses on the complexity of the struggle,
its ramifications, on, for example, the magnificent stature of Quin-
lan and the hard poverty of Vargas who has ‘ no comprehension
of the moral beauty which underlies Quinlan’s warped behaviour ’

{ibid, p 136). A further step and this becomes the discovery of
the Welles ‘ thematic ’, the real meaning of the film . beneath
the circumstances of the narrative context: ‘ In its deep thematic
pattern. Touch of Evil, despite its detective-story alibi, can be seen
as a master work of Orson Welles ’ (Bazin, op cit, p 115). If con-
sidered superficially the story seems to oppose the honest official
and the rotten cop. a more profound reading identifies the Faustian
strength of Quinlan, his Shakespearian immensity, the Wellesian
figure par excellent: ‘ It is the tension created between the grandeur
of the hero and the moral option we have to take against and in
spite of that grandeur that makes Welles’ works tragedies ’ (ibid,

P 119 )-

Welles himself understands the film mainly at the level charac-
terised by a Bazin as ‘ superficial ’ - see the interview with him in
Cahiers du cinema n 84 (June 1958): Quinlan is ‘ without ambiguity ’

- ‘ What is personal in the film is my hatred of police abuse of its
power ’, ‘ the angle from which the film should be seen is that,
whatever he says, Vargas is my spokesman ’; all that one can have
is a certain sympathy for Quinlan, for his ‘ human failings ’ (the
psychological explanation of his behaviour in the film: he frames
suspects because his wife’s murderer escaped justice).

The question here is in no sense to refuse these interpretations,
to which systems in the film clearly respond (and which are
susceptible to straight ideological analysis); it is evident, to take
a simple instance, that Quinlan is played according to a system of
‘ Shakespearian-ness ’ climaxing in the final blood-washing (Welles’
last Hollywood film had after all been Macbeth just ten years
earlier). Even less is it a question of judging behveen them; the
views of Welles and Bazin are anyway entirely homogeneous, as the
latter recognises by the \ety postulation of superficial and deep
levels, as the former acknowledges by doubling the spokesman
Vargas with his own presence for Quinlan (the straight ideological
analysis would note, however, that neither make any mention of
the dramatisation of the law/justice exploration over the American/
Mexican tension). What is important is to grasp the terms of the
assumption of the narrative coherence (which is to begin an analysis
of ideology in its unconscious rather than its pre-conscious forma-
tions). The film is crystal clear, but at a cost, which is the system of
the film. It is even tempting to give that cost a name (since it is this
name which the Vargas-Quinlan interpretations never fail to omit),

‘ Susan ’: the object for restitution (of restitution) with which the
narrative has constantly to reckon, figure of the expense (economy

and logic, cost and omission) of its resolution.

Let us come back to the idea of narrative resolution. Such resolu-
tion depends on a dual process of transformation and exchange;
the exhaustion of the discourse being the economy of the con-
version between the one and the other, the order of redeployment
(no waste). In this respect, resolution can be defined not just with
regard to the final solution but over the whole of the narrative: at
every moment the narrative operates by a powerful and system-
atic (systematising) tendency to balance (as one ‘ balances the
books ’), the construction of units of equilibrium of exchange/
transformation. To say this, moreover, is to stress that the opera-
tion of that tendency divides up the text in a multitude of extents,
large and small units, and across the range of matters of expression.
Examples: the structural rhyme of the two Tanya segments realised
in a play of repetition and differentiation over all the matters of
expression; the system of high/low-angle shots round Quinlan
(low-angle until the moment of the deal with Grandi, reconfirma-
tion of the high-angle domination - Quinlan’s * fall ’ - at the close
of the second main Tanya segment), which is itself intersected with
other angle systems (the first Tanya segment cuts to a high-angle
shot of Vargas, the second to a high-angle shot of Quinlan from
Vargas’ point of view); the systematic use of the bar (Quinlan
moves up it -Vargas smashes Risto back down it, and the deal
there with Grandi is the turning point of the exchange in the
narrative between the two); the close-up emphasis on the notice in
the hotel not to leave anything behind except the key (Quinlan
leaves his cane, the key to the crime) repeats the notice in the
blind woman’s shop not to take anything. The examples are so
many signifiers of the order of the narrative, of the position of the
discourse in that order, its disposition.

The last point is crucial. The relative position of narrative and
discourse is fundamental to the economy of the narrative and that
position - the economy - is the exhaustion of the one by the other.
It is not that the discourse must disappear; rather, that it must
only appear as. precisely, the disposition of the narrative, from
which it may be rethickened a little as the position of a style
(narrative -f style = Touch of Evil). All the habitual paradigms
of discussion of film - content/form, content/technique, content/
cinema, signified/signifier even -are locked in this positionality.
Hence the obligation for film analysis to pose its object differently.

The major examples (the most obvious) of this process of
transformation in exchange are. of course, those realised in the
relations of characters and action; for the narrative of Touch of
Evil: the bands of the conflict Quinlan/Vargas, the exchange of
Menzies; a simple representation is provided in Figure IV.

71

FIGURE IV

Explosion

Framing Bugging ^

Susan tost

Susan found

Sanchez

confesses

Within the curve described by the initial problem (the explosion)
and its solution (Sanchez reported to have confessed) unfolds the
narrative of the confrontation between Vargas’ justice and Quin-
lan’s brutality (at this level the solution of the initial problem is
an irony- Quinlan framed the right man -and an added force to
the message - justice must be guaranteed for the guilty as well as
for the innocent). This narrative runs from the arrival of Quinlan
on the scene of the explosion to his death after the recording of
his admissions (his confession) and is marked by Vargas* loss of
Susan and their reunion at the close. The turning points of the
narrative progression are the discovery by Vargas of the framing
of Sanchez and then of Quinlan’s guilt in the murder of Grandi;
the first initiating the plot against Susan (Quinlan retaliates),
the second the beginning of the end (Quinlan trapped). For both,
Menzies’ position is fundamental, the point of a formal pattern of
exchange: in the first Menzies is with Quinlan against Vargas (the
agent of the framing, Menzies constantly tries to get Quinlan to
answer Vargas* charges, himself tears up the notes Vargas makes
in the Records Office), in the second he is with Vargas against
Quinlan (he shows Vargas the cane, helps Vargas with the record-
ing. shoots Quinlan to protect Vargas); the cane is the figure of
exchange: returning the cane to Quinlan in II d, Menzies passes it
to Vargas in IV d.

The exchange of Menzies has its own action, its own rhythm,
forms what might be seen as a narrative drama - ’ the rejection of
Menzies ' - with its own units: He- the ecstasy of the discovery
of the dynamite and the partnership with Quinlan (M near medium-
shot, face creased with smiles ‘ Well Hank has done it againl He’s
nailed his man! */ Q off ‘Thanks to you, partner’/ M ‘Me! ’);
II f - Menzies pushed out by the intrusion of Grandi (Q ‘ What are
you waiting for? ’); Hid -the deal with Grandi, Quinlan’s new
partnership (G ‘In this deal, we’re partners ’); III h- the attempt
to get Quinlan back; III k - Menzies unable to find Quinlan; III m -
the defence of Quinlan against Vargas and the collapse in despair;
IV a - Quinlan, with Grandi, rings Menzies. shouts at his despair;

72 IV d — Menzies gives the cane to Vargas; IV f — Menzies does the
recording, shoots Quinlan.

The narrative of the Vargas/Quinlan conflict is accompanied by
this narrative of Menzies which is its motor, its movement: the
exchange of Menzies from Quinlan to Vargas is its resolution: in
the final scene, Menzies has become a walking ‘ Mike ’, Vargas’
instrument, and Quinlan shoots him as Vargas (composition in
frame: Menzies drops to the ground revealing Vargas in his place
behind), just as he then shoots Quinlan for Vargas. The Menzies
narrative, however, is more than simply this exchange. * He loved
him,* says Tanya of Menzies’ relationship with Quinlan, and the
whole of his narrative is offered in terms of a rejection in love, an
amorous crisis of ^vhich his collapse is the climax (Still 29); whence
his split in the second of the main Tanya segments - he is in
Tanya’s place, the place of Quinlan’s search, and in Vargas’, the
narrative search for Quinlan: Stills 38 and 47; he is Tanya (the dis-
solve) and Mike (the bug). We come back here to that excess of
exchange detailed in certain of its figures in the commentary on
the beginning of the film. Figure V is a way of writing the excess
against its omission in the simple narrative line of Figure IV, forced
to leave as a blank circle the points where the exchange meets
Susan.

The opposition between Quinlan and Vargas passes through the 73
exchange of Menzies and this is the condition of the restitution of
Susan (the kiss interrupted and resumed): Menzies takes Susan to
the motel and returns to give Quinlan the cane; Menzies gives
Vargas the cane and thereby returns Susan (innocents her). The
narrative problem of law and justice is also expressed as a problem
of husband and wife (Vargas and Susan are on honeymoon); ‘ law ’
and * husband ’ being satisfactory terms in so far as they subsume
adequately ‘ justice ’ and ‘ wife in so far as they are full, unified,
which indeed is the definition of order. It follows that the per-
version of order is the division of law and justice explainable in
its turn as the division of man and wife; if Quinlan is crooked, it
is because his wife was strangled, leaving him as ‘ Citizen Cane ’

(a psychoanalysis of Welles would have to pause on the name
Susan as a substitute for the ‘ Connie ’ of the novel).

This psychological explanation works for the economy of the
narrative but does no more than focus the logic of that economy
(rather as a screen memory holds and displaces). When Menzies
returns with the cane, he gives Quinlan it and Susan and Grand!

(Still 16 - Menzies brings Grand! in: Q ‘ W/ioVe you got here? V
M ‘ I forgot to give you your cane at the moment of the exchange
of the cane, both grasping it, Menzies is uttering the words ‘ Mrs
Vargas ’); when he passes the cane to Vargas, he returns Susan
and Quinlan as the real strangler. What is psychological explanation
for the narrative is fantasy in the movement of the system, the other
side of that explanation: it is there a question not of husband,
wife and killer (Vargas, Susan and Quinlan, Quinlan, wife and x)
but of the violence of the establishment of the guilt of the woman
in order to maintain the husband’s position - the explosion of Zita
is the opening factor in a series which ends inevitably in Quinlan
strangling Grandi over Susan’s body as the image and repression
of desire, the reality of its position in the narrative where Vargas
only exists away from Susan’s body in the attempt to clean her
name (‘ How can I leave until her name is cleanl cleanl ’ IV e).

Consider the number of elements that break the economy of the
narrative as the figures of its logic — the Menzies rejection, Tanya’s,
the Night Man. the homosexual fraternity of the Grandi family,

Zita - and the manner in which these touch the narrative instance
at the point of its oscillation, namely (since it is the name that
falls) Susan. The motel clerk’s lengthy and narratively impracticable
role (‘ I’m the night man ’) is a theatrically hysterical neurosis, a
permanent defence against sexuality as represented by Susan’s
body -in his scene with her (II a), hinging on her desire to go to
bed, we always see him as panic across her body (Still 15) and the
last shot shows him jittering outside the chalet, framed by an
infinite void. Opposite him, Hta, as that sexuality contained, the
body-image, represented, positioned, which sexuality, however, can
return, hence the Night Man’s panic. Night Man and Zita indeed

74 are the extremes of the same line which circles between fetishism
and hysteria; from the shot of the Night Man jittering at Susan’s
body, the film cuts to a close-up of a hand plunging a detonator
marked ‘ Linneker Construction Company from panic at the
sudden demand of Susan to the explosion of Zita, the return of
the demand and its total destruction, Linneker and Zita, whose
very image needs to be rased out. Susan centres the two: the just
mean, the lawful place, image and repression, wife, the objectality
“ the practicability - of desire, its position and its name. Between
the two, however, that position is, precisely, precarious, a constant
supplication (remember that etymologically * precarious ’ is a juri-
dicial term meaning * obtained by prayers, by supplication ’); in
the eyes of the Night Man Susan is reflected as the excess of Zita,
explosive, sizzling, and it is this reflection which is the initial
premiss of the film — the explosion that disjoins Linneker and Zita
and Susan and Vargas. From then on, everything turns round the
mise-en-sc^ne of Susan’s body and the panic images of its sexuality.
The line from Night Man to Zita is crossed by the line of the
fantastic sexual brouillage of the Grandi family - homosexual,
lesbian, hermaphrodite (Still 25). That these images are banal,
laughable, fantastic is the point: Susan displaced, it is as though
the film is operated from the perspective of the Night Man; the
narrative out of true, it is as though the film replies with the
images of the panic which is the other side of the position of its
‘ truth ’, images which simply (and not critically) over-turn it.

The chain of figures this overturning produces can be seized
from any moment of the film but it has a kind of accumulative
loop in the strangulation scene, which might thus be examined in
detail in its figurative repercussions.

It will be recalled that this is the scene in which Susan, having been
brought back from the motel to the Grandi hotel in Los Robles,
is delivered over by Grandi to Quinlan who then kills Grandi while
Susan lies ‘ drugged * on the bed. For the sake of clarity, the
relevant segment (IV a) will be divided up into successive stages.

(1) The segment begins from inside the hotel room with a near
shot of the door being slowly pushed open by Grandi. The shot is
a continuity reference to the final shot of the assault on Susan
in the motel (III 1 ): as she is picked up off the bed, legs held
open, the door of her room is pushed shut and we are left with
the darkness that Grandi now opens; there outside, we are here
inside.

(2) The next shot reverses the point of view: from the hall
corridor, we look over Grandi’s shoulder into the room, a per-
spective which reveals Susan lying undressed on a bed, two women
on the far side of her./ The ensuing conversation between Grandi

and the women, members of the family, stresses that no harm has 75
been done to Susan - she has been neither drugged (all that has
happened is that she has been quietened with pentothal and reefer
smoke has been blown on to her clothing) nor, a fortiori,
raped. Evidently, this is a gesture to the Hays code and its avatars
- the violence of the motel assault is annulled by a kind of retro-
spective watering-down. It is also, however, crucially significant
(contingence and significance co-operate; the film works within
the code and its images): Susan cannot but be intact — the ex-
plosion, the broken kiss, the unconsummated honeymoon, the
intolerable demand {imaged in Still 18, Susan groaning swooningly
into the phone - Vargas hangs up; reversed in Still 26 - Pancho
obliterates her. Still 28). Once again, symbolic and stereotype move
together: the presentation - the image - of Susan (of ‘ desire ’) is
entirely conventional; what is important, precisely the interruption,
is the displacement of the narrative of objects (Susan as object of
exchange) by that image as the proposition of the bar of desire, of
a subject neither in the narrative nor in the image (the problem
is one of position) but in the endless circulation of the friction of
the two (the narrative and the images it produces of its panic).
Desire can only be figured in the very terms of its repression but
that figuration is already excessive in the narrative of that* repres-
sion./ The room is dominated by the bed (between the explosion
and her restitution at the end, Susan spends the whole of the film
in bed -in the motel, in the hotel here, in the police cell); enor-
mous, solidly ornate with its iron tail-piece, massively * primal-
scenish ’ - leaving, one of the woman runs her hand for us (angle,
nearness, etc) caressingly over the iron rail in an erotic marking
(Still 30).

(3) Grandi, having dismissed the women, goes out into the hall
and calls to Quinlan who emerges from a doorway, comes down
the hall and enters the room, Grandi shutting the door again after
them./ As he emerges from the doorway, Quinlan’s familiar sil-
houette is stressed - his bulk, his cane, his chewing. The cane is to
be a clue of guilt; left behind by Quinlan at the end of the scene,
it establishes him as the killef for Menries and then for Vargas.
Equally, as has been seen, the cane is important in the movement
of exchange; he who has the cane has Susan - as Quinlan is now
to have Susan. Round the cane, guilt and law, crime and exchange,
can then be traced the pattern of the system, the figure of the logic
of the narrative, its term, and a host of traits cluster as the dilatory
image of that logic, that figure, that term: the cane, the law, the
swollen foot, the blind woman, the cane as key to the riddle of
the strangulation for which Quinlan discovers himself to be guilty,
which he himself commits. The film knows one formal relation (it
is the constant principle of the very composition in frame) - the
triangle, ceaselessly varied in the perpetual narrative of the problem
of desire and position; here: Quinlan. Susan, Grandi.

76 (4) Inside the room, Quinlan confronts Grandi over the bed, over

Susan, with Vargas’ gun and makes him phone Menzies at the
police station./ Triangle, composition repeat the previous scene
in the hotel (I e) when Susan was threatened by Grandi with
Pancho absent in the mirror; the position of the gun in Still 31 is
exactly the position of the gun in that scene; simply, Grandi now
occupies Susan’s place./ Quinlan has Grandi turn out the light,
leaving only the on/off illumination from the neon sign in the
street. Again recalling the earlier hotel scene, this refinds thereby
the systematisation of light in the film as weapon and sexual attack
(remember Pancho and the torch); the paradigm is clear: illumina-
tion - Zita or Susan as stripper or pin-up/obliteration - Susan
blacked out, Zita’s picture erased with add./ Like the cane, the
gun exchanges narratively and symbolically; Quinlan threatens
Grandi (Susan) with Vargas’ gun; Vargas has the gun in I k (has
Susan), finds it disappeared in III n (finds the scene of Susan’s
* rape ’) ; and the Night Man writhes hysterically — ‘ What would
I want with a gun! ’/ Before assaulting Grandi, Quinlan must reject
Menzies; as Menzies has telephoned Tanya to find Quinlan, so
Quinlan telephones Menzies to abandon him. The telephone is a
fundamental mode of triangulation in the film: Menzies/Tanya-Man
(Quinlan’s absence), Stills 22 and 23; Quinlan-Grandi (Menzies*
absence)/Menzies. Stills 32 and 33; Vargas/Susan/Blind Woman
(the absence of Vargas to Susan), Stills 17. 18 and 19; etc.

(5) Quinlan strangles Grandi and exits leaving the body hang-
ing over the foot of the bed./ The assault on Grandi is violent
in the extreme (stress of camera movement, close-up, wide-angle
distortion), ‘ unpleasant ‘ in the sense of the conventions of a
sexual violence; it repeats — realises - the murder of Quinlan’s wife,
the stocking used is Susan’s, Grandi’s posture is a grotesque in-
vitation (close medium-shot, lights on and off, frenzied music, his
hair-piece askew, shirt off the shoulder, he shivers arms out-
stretched, body open, along a wall of the room), condensing the
trouble - the mixture - of the family (the theme of homosexuality
strong after the rejection of Menzies)./ Thoughout the scene, Susan
is lying undressed on the bed, her head at its foot, tossing and
grunting; her moaning reaches its climax at the moment of stran-
gulation and intercutting puts her for Grandi and Grandi for her,
strangulation and rape, violence and pleasure, defines the crime.
Stills 34, 35 and 36 are the last three shots of the strangulation.
The final shot of the ecstatic Quinlan (Still 36) ends in darkness
as the neon sign goes off and there is then a cut in the dark to
Susan peaceful on the bed. becoming visible after a few instants
(Still 37) - an effect of fade out and in. The passage between the
two shots condenses the scene, the chains of elements that cross
through the film: Susan obliterated at the point of desire, the
crime is that position (law and justice are split over the story of
an empty shoe-box suddenly filled with dynamite). Caught in the

figures of its own crime, the narrative is constantly emptied; Susan 77
can be restored but precariously, a gap is left (Still 58)./ Grandi’s
body hangs over the bedrail the woman caresses, the (primal) scene
played out.

(6) Susan wakes to discover Grandi’s body, rushes screaming
to the window and is seen outside on the fire escape shouting
for help./ When Susan opens her eyes, it is to the mirror-image
of Grandi, his head over her head, the camera cutting subjectively
from one point of view to the other./ Image of the crime (rape,
murder, obliteration), Grandi is an inverted image of Vargas; ^vaking
on her honeymoon on a hotel bed Susan finds Grandi in her hus-
band’s place. From the fire escape, she sees Vargas below in his
car and cries ‘ Mikel Mikel Mike! ’ — what else is there to do but
accept the crime and put the image back in its place, the right way
up? the names return to ‘ Suzy ’ and ‘ Mike ’, the narrative can
be played out, more or less resolved by Vargas and his microphone.

To be continued.

SEFT Weekend Schools 1975
Mise en Scene

The second in a series of weekend schools organised by
the Society for Education in Film and Television, it will
- be held from 6-8 June 1975.

The weekend will present the range of examples of mise
en scene drawn from films by Ophuls, Renoir, N. Ray,
Hitchcock, Hawks and Minnelli, and will examine them
in the context of different critical analyses.

An examination of the visual style of the Film Noir will
also be included. The school will comprise screenings,
presentations, and group discussions. Further details and
application forms from

SEFT

63 Old Compton Street
London WIV 5PN

78

Made in Ealing^
John Ellis

1 . Why Production?

Writing about film production has generally been a ghetto of
cinema criticism. As most film criticism has seen its main function
as fixing the meaning of a film, then ideas of production have been
called in only as another witness to the interpretation. This may be
either that Citizen Kane is not an anti-capitalist film. (‘How can
you imagine - if you know that capitalists do not act haphazardly,
which is easy to prove - that such a monopoly could be capable
of producing a film against capitalism? ’ - Gerard Leblanc in Cin 4 -
thique n 6 p 28), or that Bunuel’s limited control over production
ruined what have been argued are ‘ his ’ finest texts:

‘ Whether in Mexico or in France, it appears he had little control
over the projects he was offered. My own memory of all the films
made during this period is of seriously marred films of considerable
interest Whether they are marred by thundering implausibilities
(Suscma, Archibatdo), crabbed plots {El and nearly all the French
stuff) or indifferent acting (especially The Young One), they all
seem to be films less interesting in themselves . . .’ (Peter Harcourt,
Six European Directors, p 119).

More serious and sustained consideration of film production can
be found in two places. The first is fan magazines, whose (often
deliberately fictitious) descriptions are intended to support and
nourish the process of stardom, both to emphasise the difference
between stars-in-real-life and normal people, and to aflirm that
they too suffer as mortals. This makes the reading of a film with
one or more of these stars in it more complicated. The film is one
text, the star is another text passing through it. The result is a
system in which any film is guaranteed to signify over and above its

1. This article has been developed from an MA thesis dealing
with the sixteen comedies and their production for the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham.

connotations as a textual system. Fan magazines, therefore, pec- 79
form more or less the same function of ‘ increasing enjoyment ’
as that claimed by much ‘ deeper ’ criticism. The other direction
of film production studies, however, is that of enlightenment,
either in detailed descriptions of film production like Lindsay
Anderson’s account of the making of Secret People at Ealing, or
the more recent ‘ sociology of culture ’ exemplified by Philip
Elliot’s The Making of a Television Series. The purpose of both
these studies is to examine the institutional constraints, techno-
logical and aesthetic; but they both take as self-evident the mean-
ing of the text thus produced. In Elliot’s book, the survey of the
audience is designed only to test the programme makers’ con-
ceptions and to contextualise the feedback. Both books are still
within a criticism which sees the text as an object with one ‘ real ’
meaning to be determined.

Against this, semiology sets an idea of a text as an area of
production of meaning, an idea of criticism which is to ‘ follow
the rhythm of the text ’. The emphasis is shifted from what the text
means to how it means. Reading is seen not as drinking the mean-
ing off the screen, but as real work which involves an audience
caught in a certain relationship with the film, using codes they
have acquired in order to produce meanings from the text. But
once this is said, it is necessary to speak historically (politically):
even with the present mode of watching (that of the confirmation
of the subject in an imaginary wholeness), not all the possibilities
of the text in question can be realised. Films are capable of pro-
ducing more than one meaning at the time of their release as well
as at different moments in history.

The distribution of codes necessary for the interpretation of
texts is unequal: some codes are not known by almost all of the
working and lower middle classes. They do not possess (and
have no need for) that complex of codes which enables an art
cinema audience to enjoy a Jansco film without knowing anything
of the Hungarian history it deals with. The possession of such
codes is the cultural monopoly of certain groups within the bour-
geoisie (teachers, culture-industry workers etc), groups which
usually do not possess economic or political power (see Pierre
Bourdieu: * Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction ’ in
Richard Brown, ed, Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change,
Tavistock, London 1973). Ealing’s creative elite was itself such a
group: its members had a privileged access to knowledge and
culture, a cultural capital which threw them onto the intellectual
side of the division between mental and manual labour, onto the
side of capital rather than that of labour. So although they were
objectively members of the petty bourgeoisie (ie neither proletarian
nor owners of the physical means of production), the position in
which they found themselves was a middle-class one, a contradic-
tory position on the edges of the bourgeoisie itself. This contra-

. 8o dictory role led them to want to make films ‘ about the people
but they were so caught within the middle class (so isolated from
the proletariat) that, for a number of reasons, they could only
conceive of ‘ the people ’ as those groups at the lowest level of
their own class: the petty-bourgeois stratum of small shopkeepers
and clerks. Hence this study deals in part with the internal contra-
dictions of the bourgeoisie, of a group in possession of cultural
‘ capital ’ aligning itself wth petty-bourgeois interests.

But it is more than that, for Ealing films were not seen and
enjoyed only by members of the film-making profession or of the
lower middle class. Even where people of different class fractions
do possess the same codes, they inhabit them differently. Using the
term ‘ code ’ tends to obscure this, as it seems to indicate a finite
set of signifiers with their signifieds in place and immutably con-
nected with them. But codes are not units of meaning, they are
areas of connotation that are occupied differently by different
classes and even class fractions, complicated by other factors such
as region (eg the Scottish readings of Ealing’s Scottish comedies),
and sex, as well as the whole cultural experience of the viewers.

However, to determine the real nature of a text such as an
Ealing film, it is necessary to examine its production within its
historical context. No rea^ng (even a reading which, ignores part
of the text: a common occurrence) escapes from the determinations
placed on it by production. Production makes a text; readings use
the text but cannot change it. So to determine the possibilities of
any film, the material, technological, aesthetic and ideological
determinants in its production have to be examined: only here can
it be decided where a film coincides with the dominant ideology,
and where it diverges from it. The position from which a film asks
its questions is often that of a class fraction that is in a contra-
dictory position within the dominant ideology: this in itself may
constitute a progressive aspect (as with the early ‘ anarchic ’ Ealing
comedies) or a reactionary aspect (like the later Titfidd Thunder-
bolt). Both the particular troubling of the dominant ideology which
the film reveals only to ‘ resolve ' it, and the particular form of the
realist mode which is being used can then generate other mean-
ings. both dominant and subordinate.

This is to see the text as a historical product, which is at once
to see its historical role and its potential. Film texts are the pro-
duct of three determinants; it is only by excavating these deter-
minants that it is possible to show the way in which (the ‘ extent ’
to which) it is seized by the dominant ideology, and therefore the
progressive potential of its alternative readings.

Any film text is first the product of the entire history of the
cinema (its system of production, distribution and exhibition) down
to the present, inasmuch as this history is written into the tech-
nology available. However, this technology is ‘ demanded and
exploited in the conjuncture of particular economic and ideological

conditions ’ (Stephen Heath, Cambridge Review, Autumn 1974), 81

its limits and potential are those of the dominant ideology. This
technology is therefore directed towards the containing of con-
tradictions within the realist mode; to the current ideas of enter-
tainment; ‘ to the renewal of the world as it is from within, ie
according to the current fashion ’ (Walter Benjamin).

The second area of determination begins to open out progressive
areas within (and sometimes in conflict with) the space of tech-
nology. This is the specific organisation of production which creates
the text. The character of the process by which ideas are generated;
the different emphases given to the stages of pre-production,
shooting and post-production; the different control that groups
have over these stages and that of exhibition and distribution; il
these develop a text whose relation to the dominant ideology is
uneasy, strained in some way. For instance. Ealing emphasised the
scripting and pre-production stage more than most studios: that
is. they paid more attention to the questions and disruptions
which the text posed than to the creation of a smooth, technically-
perfect surface. Similarly, their agreement with the Rank Organisa-
tion contained a clause whereby the studio had the right to refuse
the terms of exhibition of any film (a right never exercised - all
Ealing’s films were released as A features).

The third area of determination is that of the beliefs of the
group controlling production. Their aesthetic and social ideas
determine the way in which conflict is resolved. This is the area
of the relative freedom of the individuals whose work creates and
sustains the structure of determinations in which they are caught
Their freedom is (necessarily) constructed from a field of possi-
bilities: the form of comedy is one such field whose strengths and
limitations are already established, even if (as in Ealing’s case) they
are used in a relatively new way. This play of freedom and deter-
minations is as true for the social beliefs of the film-makers, both
in that they belong to the middle class, and to a certain fraction
of that class (the possessors of ‘ cultural capital ’); and in the
ways in which their particular beliefs lead them to adopt, in their
film-making, the position of a different class. This is Ealing’s
situation: a group of conventionally educated intellectuals, through
a certain liberal-radicalism, come to make films about, and for.

‘ the people ’, whom they think of as the lower levels of the petty
bourgeoisie. Thus individuals are a vital part of the process, not
as finished entities with world views and metaphysical preoccupa-
tions. but as social beings.

This is the process which forms the text, the raw material from
which readings are produced. The ways in which this raw material
is structured determine the form of the production of meaning.

The precise limits of the alternative readings of a text can only
be grasped by examining its process of production, understanding
by ‘ process of production ’ the way in which it relates to the

82 dominant ideology, where it silently meshes with it, and where it
(consciously and unconsciously) reveals its contradictions with
that ideology and its unease in the face of history. Progressive and
reactionary tendencies in a film are therefore determined by taking
into account not only the differing audiences for which it is
intended, but also the process which produced it.

If film production and consumption are thought in this way.
it becomes possible to bridge the present division between radical-
ism in film criticism and radicalism in film production: a situation
where SEFT (with honourable exceptions) neglects the politics of
film production, and the ACTT report Nationatising the Film
Industry can argue:

* Transferring the film industry from the private to the public
sector will alter more than the industry’s economic function. The
industry’s social function will radically change. New demands will
be made of it, and new structures must, among other things, be
flexible enough to cope with these new demands whether they

come from outside or within We have avoided making a great

number of detailed proposals about operations after nationalisation,
and emphasised the organisational aspects of a publicly-owned
film industry ’ (para 129).

It is necessary to think a radical change in the social relations of
production at the same time as a radical change in the social
relations of consumption. The two enterprises cannot progress
separately.

2. Ealing and the Industry

At the end of the War, Britain was producing about forty feature
films a year, six of which were Ealing’s. The War had seen the
inauguration of a new form of realism, a ‘ documentary approach *
of which Ealing provided a good example. Moreover, the distribu-
tion of power in the industry had changed: the acquisition by
Rank of Gaumont-British and Odeon cinemas meant that they
became one of the three major forces in the industry. They owned
two of the three large cinema circuits, the biggest single distribu-
tors, and 70 per cent of the studio space then available. The second
major force. Associated British Picture Company, also owned
studios (some requisitioned or being rebuilt), the other large
cinema chain and the second largest distributors. The third defining
force in the British industry was Hollywood, which consistently
provided over half the films seen in the cinemas. Its power there-
fore lay predominantly in distribution, but it also had some
production interests (Warner, MGM) and Warner’s had a 25 per
cent holding in ABPC. These three forces defined the British cinema,
and their hold was consolidated as cinema declined in importance
in the 1950’s.

After the War, Rank set out on a major programme of production 83
expansion, backed by Lord Rank’s extensive capital in flour-milling.

The aim was to break into the American and world market, setting
up distribution companies and buying chains of prestige cinemas
in the US, Canada, South Africa etc. In England they made
super-spectaculars like Caesar and Cleopatra (cost £1,278,006) for
prestige purposes, in order to creat a demand for British films in
America, and also tried to expand production by cost-cutting
methods like Independent Frame, and the Rank-financed but totally
autonomous Independent Producers Ltd, through which Powell/
Pressburger’s Archers Films, Lean/Neame/Havelock-Allen’s Cine-
guild etc made the films they wanted. It was in this atmosphere of
immense and costly expansion and experimentation (the Cookham
cartoon unit was axed after costing some half million pounds),
that Balcon concluded an exceptional finance and distribution deal
with Rank:

‘ Negotiations were skilfully conducted by Reg Baker and eventually
an agreement was concluded which gave Ealing complete
production autonomy and independence, circuit release for Ealing
films, favourable distribution terms, and approval of the terms on
which our films were booked to cinemas. As far as finance \vas
concerned, the Rank Organisation provided a 50 per cent
contribution (subsequently 75 per cent) and other fringe benefits,
altogether a unique contract * {Michael Balcon presents ... A
Lifetime in Films, p 154).

Thus Ealing became an independent company tied into one of the
dominant forces in the industry: they were engaged in a distinctive
and innovatory form of film-making which at the same time
fulfilled enough of the industry’s basic requirements to make them
a safe gamble, a prized commodity.

Rank’s expansion programme began to run into trouble even
before the disastrous 1947 dollar crisis. Production in 1946 lost
them £1,667,000: they had emulated Hollywood’s production
values (including the extravagance) rather than inaugurating a
new style of film-making; they lost heavily on prestige roadshow
productions, while cheaper films like the Ealing comedies more
than covered their costs and more specialised films like Hamlet
made money on the arthouse circuit; and their attempt to capture
a section of the American market came at a point when the
American majors were finding that this market alone was no longer
able to support their own production. The Hollywood majors still
controlled the larger cinema chains, so Rank’s task was doubly
difiicult. Hollywood was uniting to protect itself, most visibly with
the formation in 1946 of the powerful Motion Picture Export
Association of America (MPEA),

The MPEA played a key role in the 1947*8 film industry crisis.
Chancellor Dalton imposed a 75 per cent duty on the value of

84 imported films as a result of the dollar crisis. The MPEA retaliated
with an immediate embargo on Britain, with the result that Rank
and ABPC were forced to launch a vastly expanded production
programme or see audiences gradually melt away in the face of
endless (mostly American) repeats. Rank, who owned most of the
available studio space, saw it ‘ both as a duty and as an oppor-
tunity ’ to plan a programme of sixty films. Ealing’s contribution
was to make a film entirely on location, as studio space was fully
used. This was Whisky Galore, made on the island of Barra. But
Dalton’s fall meant a victory for the MPEA, perhaps sooner than
expected. The new President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson,
reached agreement with them even before all of Rank’s films were
under way. Moreover the forty-seven (often inferior) films Rank
had produced were suddenly in competition with the best of a
year’s Hollywood productions. Rather than see audiences disappear
into other cinemas, they scrapped many of these, losing anything
between £3 million (Rank’s official figure on new accounting pro-
cedures) and £5 million. This date marks the beginning of the
decline of British film production. John Davies spearheaded a
general cutback in Rank’s cinema activities, and diversification
into fields already sketched by the interests they had inherited
from Gaumont-British. Ealing, secure and successful, was not
directly affected.

Wilson took certain steps to counteract the loss of money and
confidence in the industry. He introduced a quota of 45 per cent
British films mandatory in all cinemas, but this proved impossible
to maintain and was later lowered. More seriously, he set up the
National Film Finance Corporation to provide high-risk money.
However, most of this was immediately loaned to Korda’s British
Lion, and was lost in their subsequent bankruptcy. The NFFC
used the rest of its capital to assist production with Rank and
ABPC. and to set up Group Three as a training ground for new
and documentarist directors (Balcon was an unpaid advisor here).
Later, the Government introduced Eady money, a levy direct from
box-office to the producer, bypassing the distributor. Eady money is
awarded on the grounds of financial success (to the films that need
it least), and its lax definition of * British ’ encouraged a large
number of American productions (like The African Queen) which
were produced in Britain but were American in all but the tech-
nicians employed. The Government’s actions amounted to under-
writing the losses of the two giants, ignoring Balcon’s demand for
preferential treatment in exhibition for independent producers and
the proposals put forward by the ACT (later ACTT) for a state
dnema chain to break the power of the monopolies. The need
for this was illustrated by the bankruptcy of British Lion (in 1955,
losing £1.8 million of NFFC money) and its subsequent problems.
It owned no dnemas and was broken by the power of Rank
and ABPC: some films were not even accepted for release, while

most were kept waiting so long that their profits were eaten up 85
by interest payments on finance loans.

Ealing was not immediately affected by these movements. Rank
continued to provide some finance, and the National Provincial
Bank provided the rest, thanks to the presence of Stephen
Courtauld on the Ealing board. The bank overdraft was £906.^92
in April 1951. However, when Stephen Courtauld resigned from
the board in 1952 (due to ill-health), the bank discontinued the
arrangement. Instead, Rank increased their contribution to 75 per
cent, and the balance was provided by the NHFC; a total of
£868,824 between December 1952 and April 1955. This was a far
more precarious arrangement. The NFFC was periodically
threatened by the Conservatives in power (it was limited in 1957
and 1970), the cinema was declining in importance, largely through
competition from TV, and Ealing’s success rate was faltering. These
factors led to the sale of the studios in 1955, and the transfer of
the production unit to MGM’s Boreham Wood, where it produced
six films in three years.

By that time it was evident that the cinema was beginning to
lose its dominant role among the entertainment media in this
country. Attendances had dropped from the 1946 peak of 1,635
million to 1,182 million in 1955. The subsequent mass sale/rent of
TV sets to the lower middle and working classes (the backbone of
cinema audiences) accelerated this decline, attendances dropping
to 501 million in i960 (and 146 million in 1971). This process was
no doubt assisted by the policies of the large companies, their
wholesale closures of cinemas, and the merger of the two Rank
chains in 1959. A production unit like Ealing’s could not survive
in this context. It needed the stable level of costs and returns that
the period 1945-55 provided. The unions (predominantly ACT and
NATKE) had made tremendous advances during the War, and their
post-war efforts were devoted to maintaining these rather than
improving on them: labour costs were therefore fairly stable.
Except for the brief period of 10 per cent inflation during the
Korean War, costs of materials did not increase rapidly until
around 1955. After that date, 'faced by falling income and rising
costs. Ealing had either to change their production values radically
or to cease production. They chose the latter.

The cinema industry gave Ealing a certain definition of its task.
Regular cinema programmes were about three hours long, with
a second and first feature. Vast amounts of capital have been
invested in this pattern of entertainment, and to deviate from it
is still very difficult, as the fate of short films has shown (see the
ACTT’s A Long Look at Short Films). At that time, second features
were considered only as quota quickies to be made for the lowest
legal cost (£7,500 for a 6o-minute film). An enterprise like Val
Lewton’s at RKO, exploiting the artistic independence afforded by
B-features, was finandally impossible in England. Instead. Ealing

86 had to concentrate on first features, with a pre-defined technical
standard, costing and length. The length was about eighty to ninety
minutes (increasing towards the end of the period in question), and
the cost range from £100,000 to anything over £350,000 for big
spectaculars, Ealing’s costs were between £120,000 and £200.000.
with the comedies averaging about £160.000, which places them
at the upper end of the average price range;

* Films costing under £150,000 were 41 per cent of the total of
first features in 1948-9, 58 per cent in 1949-50. and 67 per cent
in 1950-1. Between the three years, the percentage of first features
costing £100,000 doubled, rising from 21 per cent to 42 per cent ’
(PEP Report: The British Film Industry, 1951, p 272).

This choice of costing was dictated by the availability of finance,
and by the fact that a certain number of films had to be made to
ensure continuing profitability. Balcon says: ®

’ Profits and losses were important of course, but our object at
Ealing was to expend certain money on making a programme of
films, and to get rather more money back on the selling of that
programme so that it turned itself over. We felt that we would
come out on top over a programme of films: it’s inevitable that
certain films make losses.’

Thus though Ealing’s aims were not directly commercial, the com-
mercial structure of the industry imposed certain basic definitions
on the studio so that a pattern of making about five films a year
emerged. But the difference between Balcon’s Ealing and the pattern
of production under Basil Dean (1931-9) was that all films were
regarded as on the same level artistically. Dean had subsidised the
prestige productions (mostly adaptations of stage plays) with a
programme of immensely popular ‘ low ’ comedies starring Gracie
Fields and George Formby. But in Balcon’s words:

’ We did not manufacture films at Ealing, we produced films. The
only things we took into account were the things that we ourselves
wanted to do. We felt that if we believed in them strongly enough,
then we would carry that belief through to an audience.’

Charles Barr has sho^vn clearly {Screen v 15 nn 1 & 2, Spring &
Summer 1974) that Ealing’s aim was to project a certain idea of
Britain. The exact historical and aesthetic nature of this aim. both
during its progressive moment after the War and in its more uncer-
tain drift in the 1950’s, is outlined below. This freedom did not go
beyond certain constraints, but these were felt to be natural and
normal by the film-makers (this being precisely their power).
Massive investments of human energy and capital had normalised
a certain number of the potentials of film. These were expressed

2. All quotations from Sir Michael Balcon, unless otherwise stated,
are from an interview with the author of this article in August 1974.

in the exhibition in the film theatres of a certain kind of enter- 87
tainment programme, but also in the very equipment which the
film-makers used.

3. Studio Technology

Technology is not a neutral force in filming: it contains in its very
construction basic assumptions about the ideological purpose of
film. Therefore the history of film is not a history of technological
development carried on in a back room by scientists dedicated to
the perfection of the medium. It is a history in which technological
development is itself tailored to the needs of the dominant
ideology. In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, it was becoming
possible for films of adequate technical quality to be made com-
pletely outside the studio. Ealing’s fiilms were not studio-bound,
but with the exception of Whisky Galore, none were completely
location films. The realism needed by Ealing was not that of the
nouvelle vague or even of Italian neo-realism, it was much closer
to the traditional studio-filming of pre-war British and American
films. Ealing did not abandon the studio: they even engineered
their location work so that it would preserve as many as possible
of the features of studio work. There were several reasons fof this:
much capital was invested in the studio and its equipment (the
studio itself was sold for £467,000); much technical skill was
invested in studio production methods; the technology for location
shooting was developed slowly as a result of these large investments
(it accelerated when the contraction of the cinema market and the
demands of television dictated cheaper productions); and finally
the kind of realistic surface needed could be achieved in the studio
as easily as on location.

The normal equipment available at the time illustrates this
complicated interplay of technological development, the material
demands of capital, ideological constraints and the learnt tech-
niques of film-makers.*

Studio cameras were bulky, blimped and sophisticated. Techno-
logical development had been .directed towards three aims: to
produce a camera that had a constant speed of twenty-four frames
a second and silent running (the demands of the realist sound
film); a camera that was rock-steady to avoid an unstable image;
and a lens which reproduced as nearly as possible the subjective
effect of an individual watching a scene, eliminating the ‘ distort-
ing ’ parallax effects of ‘ true ’ perspective. Cameras were normally
mounted on a tripod as tall as an average man, completing the
effect of recreating the monocular perspective of a spectator watch-
ing a real scene. Tripod mounting was assumed in several cameras;

3. The bulk of the technical information for this section has been
taken from R H Bomack: Cine Data Book, Fountain Press, London
1950.

88 the Mitchell Standard and the Newall (made by a Rank subsidiary)
used a focussing system through a side-mounted telescope, with
the camera tipped side-ways on its tripod to put this in the posi-
tion of the lens. The requirements of sound shooting also imposed
heavily on the design of cameras: the Mitchell Standard, the Vinten
Everest and Normandy all had motors synchronised only for
twenty-four frames a second. Studio cameras that could shoot fast
or slow motion were the exception rather than the rule. These
cameras were also blimped, muffled so that the sound of the
mechanism was not picked up by the recording equipment, with
the result that they weighed around 150 pounds. To move them
therefore became a major operation: a tracking shot required
either a trailer with pneumatic wheels or tracks. British studios,
in contrast to most others, had no curved tracks. In short, to get
a complicated camera movement ‘ right * (smooth, even, unobtru-
sive) required several takes. As this tended to slow down shooting
and to increase costs, directors and cameramen tended to avoid
such movements. Thus the accumulated determinants written into
the cameras produced a tendency towards a cinema where fluid
camera movements were replaced with fluent and complex cutting.
Hitchcock, in his interview with Truffaut (Panther, p 218). shows
more limitations of these cameras: when he made Rope (1948) in
a single shot, he found that the largest magazines would take
1,000 ft (11 mins 6 secs at sound speed), so magazine changeovers
had to be masked by someone obscuring the camera. He also
describes the difficulties of orchestrating such long takes, using a
large and specialised studio staff accustomed to short takes.

Portable cameras were beginning to change. The standard Bell
and Howell Eyemo used by Ealing was designed for exceptional
shots: it had a fixed shutter speed, a lens turret comprising three
lenses, a 100 ft magazine with the spring-wound motor running
for a maximum of 55 ft (35 secs at sound speed), and provision
for electric running up to 400 ft (4^ minutes). It weighed about
15 pounds. However, the new Eclair Camereclair was just becoming
available: it weighed ii| pounds when loaded; with a standard
cassette-loading 400 ft magazine, waist battery belt, variable speed
and reflex focussing. This was a portable camera on which normal
shooting was possible. However, Ealing’s realism did not need it,
and its full possibilities were not exploited till the 1960’s.

The development of camera shutter speed, film negative stock
and studio lighting had all been directed towards increasing the
range of contrasts available on black-and-white film, and thus the
illusion of depth and flawless surface of the image. Film stock and
printing were both directed towards high contrast, non-grainy pic-
tures; shutter speeds on studio cameras varied from around
i/50th second to i/9ooth second (the Eyemo was fixed at i/54th
second); a studio lighting style had been developed also to give the
illusion of depth (physical and thus psychological). The conditions

of studio lighting, with its large range of contrasts, were difficult
to reproduce on location. Thus Ealing’s overall shooting style
tended to compromise between the two: a bland lighting style was
adopted in the studio (because the renunciation of certain possible
effects connoted ‘ documentary ’); highlighting and spotlighting
were used sparingly, creating a rather flat picture which -seems
almost drab in comparison with the chiaroscuro effects of the
Hollywood film noir (Doubh Indemnity) or the deep focus film {Mrs
Miniver), but approximates closely to that obtained by current TV
lighting procedures. In return, location shooting was approximated
to the studio: the street in Passport to Pimlico was built on a
bombsite as a set. This made possible a certain amount of control
of the lighting effects.

Colour presented a new range of possibilities. Hitchcock states:

‘I especially admired the approach to lighting used by the
Americans in 1920 because it overcame the two-dimensional nature
of the image by separating the actor from the background through
the use of backlights — they call them liners — to detach him
from his setting. Now in colour there is no need for this, unless
the actor should happen to be dressed in the same colour as the
background, but that’s highly improbable. It sounds elementary,
doesn’t it, but that’s the tradition and it’s quite hard to break
from it ’ {ibid, p 220).

Colour provided the full range of the visible spectrum with all its
opportunities for contrast, so backlighting was no longer necessary.
This could have provided the solution to one of the problems of
Ealing’s location shooting where, whilst such subtle lighting was
impossible, the facial expressions had to carry all the signification
of mood since music was not used to supply this information (an-
other tenet of Ealing realism). And as Balcon says, ‘ On location
you’d sometimes get better results with colour; sometimes you
could get good enough results with colour when you’d have been
held up using black and white *.

But at this time colour was new, and was used to connote the
super-realism of the spectacle. Where No Vultures Fly, a film with
long stretches in which the camera feasts on the flora and fauna of
Africa, is a colour film; so is The Titfield Thunderbolt, which
emphasises the picturesqueness of the English countryside and the
glamour of the trains. Not until The Ladykillers (1955 - the last
film in the studio) is colour used for a lower-middle-class urban
comedy. Here it still retains some of the spectacular elements:
the rich dark reds and browns (reminiscent of Hammer horror)
show that the London of terraced streets is no longer a real loca-
tion for events carrying connotations of actuality (cf the whole
range of films from It Always Rains on Sunday to The Lavender
Hill Mob). The setting is by then accepted, another stereotype in
the common cinematic language enlivened by the connotations it

90

had received from its previous uses as much as from its place in
everyday experience. The audience’s pleasure in The Ladykillers
lies in the recognition of many stereotypes (the gangsters, the little
old lady, the barrow boy etc) and the interplay between them,
rather than, as with the earlier comedies, in the possibility of a
closer, more radical self-recognition.

This matter of lighting and colour illustrates the complicated
interplay of determinants on the form of a text, and on the practice
of film-making. Hitchcock notes that the practice of using liners
persisted when its technical raison d’etre had disappeared: Balcon
says that colour could be used more efficiently on location to over-
come lighting problems; but aesthetics gave it a different function,
so most of the films were made in black and white.

The studios themselves are also a part of this process. As the
intention was to produce five films a year, each had an average
of ten weeks on the studio floor. Thus space limitations were a
real factor in defining the shape of the films: Ealing had three
main stages of about 8,000 sq ft each. This was fairly small, as the
average size of major studio stages in 1950 was 11,500 sq ft (PEP
Report, 1951, p 277). Denham’s two massive stages were 35,000 sq
ft; Ealing could make a maximum space of 16.000 sq ft by sliding
back the doors between stages 3a and 3b, but only rarely, because
of tight shooting schedules. In addition to the shooting itself.
Ealing had facilities for pre-production, post-production and pub-
licity. Development, printing and optical processes were carried
out at Rank’s Denham Laboratories, where picture quality was
tailored to the demands of the Rank cinema chains. Ealing there-
fore employed about 400 to 430 people; of these. 110 were tech-
nicians (directors, camera staff, sound, cutting etc); 170 were
construction staff (art and costume staff, scene painters etc); and
150 were * clerical and other grades ’ which presumably includes
the script department, accountants, publicity, secretaries and
typists. This distribution of staff differs from that in the industry
as a whole:

Administration

Construction

Technical

Ealing %

35

40

25

British average %

24
46

25

(Source; Michael Balcon, British Institute of Management Occa-
sional Paper 1950; and Board of Trade Journal 1951.)

This itself reflects the different emphasis given at Ealing to pre-
and post-production; more administrative staff were needed to deal
with the internal production of scripts and with publicity, and a
large production and accounting staff to keep costs and shooting
schedules as low as possible. Ealing Studios accounted for some
14 per cent of the technicians employed in the industry in 1949.

4 . Organisation of Production

Charles Barr’s articles on Ealing Studios in Screen v 15 nn i & 2
(Spring and Summer 1974) have already dealt with the specific
history of Ealing, built as the first sound studio in England by
Basil Dean, and originally planned to be double its eventual size:
Balcon attributes this shortfall to the unsuccessful stock-market
flotation of 1931. Barr also contrasts the different production
methods adopted by Dean and Balcon, as well as charting the
various influences on Balcon’s method of production and the dis-
tinctive forms of Ealing’s post-war product. The influences he traces
are those of Dean himself; of Balcon’s previous career; of the
1930’s documentary movement; and of the war situation. Equally
important is Barr’s demonstration of the way in which production
under Balcon was stabilised with a large staff of directors, asso-
date producers, editors and cameramen etc under permanent con-
tract; as well as the way in which promotions were made internally.
Barr tabulates the Ealing careers of this tight group, and provides
detailed information (on which I draw heavily) about the previous
and subsequent lives of major figures.

This gives a picture of a creative elite in the studio; at any time
there were about eight directors, eight assodate producers and
half a dozen scriptwriters who formed the nucleus around .whom
projects grew. Other people with a major influence on the eventual
shape of the films were the senior editors (a pool of about six);
the cameramen, of whom three or four were on permanent contract
(Douglas Slocombe for seventeen years, Otto Heller for the last
three years); and the art directors. In all, the creative elite num-
bered about fifty out of the staff of 400.

Whereas normal union rates were paid to the majority of the
staff, this ‘ top echelon of creative people as Balcon calls them,
accepted substantially lower salaries than was normal:

‘ During the war and immediately afterwards we were prepared to
work not attaching too much importance to what we earned. But
during the 1950’s I think that the studio was showing slight signs
of fragmentation: temptations must have been coming from other
people. The agents fastened on to Ealing and our personnel, and
they’d get offers from all directions ’ (Balcon).

T E B Clarke, the scriptwriter of seven of the comedies, describes
one such approach. After his Academy Award for The Lavender Hill
Mob. he was approached by ‘ a well-known Hollywood actor lately
turned producer ’ who wanted some spare-time uncredited writing
work:

* In the absence of a written contract he was ready to pay me cash
in advance. At this he snapped open his attache case; it was packed
with five-pound notes. ... I forget how long I hesitated, but I can
still recall the look of scornful pity on that familiar face at my

ultimate refusal * {This is where I came in. 1974, p 182).

Clarke’s loyalty to Ealing is graphically demonstrated by this, but
it is a loyalty which he looks back upon wth a little regret:

‘ During my sixteen years at Ealing I dealt personally with all
renewals of my original contract. Astonishing as it seems* now, it
was considered rather caddish for anyone on the creative side to
employ an agent, who doubtless would have gained one better
terms than one managed to get oneself. Today when I re-read some
of the clauses in those contracts which I had cheerfully accepted,

I gasp over my humility and the fidelity to Ealing that caused me
to disregard all enticements from the outside world ’ (p 181).

He claims that the time of The Lavender Hilt Mob he was paid
around £1,500. * and I have had nothing from it since Balcon
thinks that Clarke’s final contract made about five years later
guaranteed him ‘ a five-figure sum

This was probably exceptional, a payment for an Academy
Award winner; most of the senior staff seem to have been paid
about £5,000 a year, the average salary for an Ealing director. This
was accepted as the price for security and artistic freedom: ‘ We
weren’t paid much but we had the advantage of being very free ’
(Mackendrick interviewed in Positif n 92. 1968). The profit from
the films was mostly creamed off by the Rank Organisation as dis-
tributors, exhibitors and co-financers. The five directors of ATP and
Ealing Studios Ltd were also paid significantly more than the film
directors, but the difference is minimal compared with that between
Rank staff and executives. The board consisted of Balcon, Stephen
Courtauld, Leslie and Reginald Baker and (from 1950) the pro-
duction supervisor, Hal Mason. Their fees amounted to a total of
£3 3. 770 in 1948 (£6.754 each if shared equally), rising to £38.090
in 1950 (£7.618 each) and £39,482 in 1954 (£7,896 each).

The exact distribution of the costs of a single Ealing film are
difficult to determine. The company is reluctant to release detailed
figures, but Balcon did give a rough estimate of a typical budget.
The total cost of each comedy was about £150,000, with Whisky
Galore the cheapest at £120,000. Of this, £5,000 went to the
direaor and associate producer (on the assumption that they were
involved in two films a year, this being half their salaries); sets
and their construction accounted for £15,000 to £20,000; the cast
for a similar amount; and the story costs and the film and labora-
tory costs were around £7,000. This scant information does begin
to show how Ealing’s production methods compared to those of
similarly priced productions. The Gater report on film production
costs gives percentage figures for four films whose average price
was £152.000 in 1946-8. The range for the producer’s and director’s
fees is 3,4 per cent to 8.2 per cent (Ealing’s are amongst the
lowest); for the story, from 2 per cent for an original script to

10.4 per cent for an expensive property. Ealing’s original scripts 93
seem to have accounted for around 5 per cent of the total. Ealing’s
cast cost little at 14 per cent (few stars were used): the range
being 14.9 per cent to 16.3 per cent; the cost of sets and con-
struction was average at 14 per cent, the range being 11.2 per cent
to 19.4 per cent. From this evidence it seems that the distribution
of film costs at Ealing was not very different from the general
pattern. No figures are available for studio charges, wages and
salaries, or finance and insurance charges, which vary considerably
for the Gater report productions. However, as I shall now go on
to demonstrate the organisation of this production differs consider-
ably from normal studio practice.

5 . Prepfoduction

‘ The most important work is done before and after a film goes on
the floor ’ (Balcon in a BFI summer school paper, 1945).

‘ Those sixteen or seventeen people sitting at the huge round table
over their cups of tea did not really fit into the usual conception

of a “ directors conference ” at all The atmosphere was

friendly and informal.

‘ And yet, almost all the producers, directors and scriptwriters
of Ealing Studios were gathered around that table in one of the
periodically held studio conferences in which views are exchanged
in all frankness, and future plans discussed without the air of
secrecy so common to many studios, particularly when different
production teams are working at the same time.

■ Sir Michael Balcon conducted the discussion almost paternally,
without any formality; and even the presence of a journalist did not
seem to impose any restraint on the free flow of ideas or the raising
of delicate questions ’ (Francis Koval, Sight and Sound Festival
Special 1951, p 8).

This is a description of the Round Table, the fortnightly meeting
of the creative elite at which .the studio schedule was decided.
Proposals were brought in at a very early stage of development (as
one-page treatment), and discussed, rejected or sent for further
work. Most of the films originated in the script department or in
the ideas of other staff; about 20 to 25 per cent were made from
novels (like Whisky Galore) or from stage successes (like The Man
in the White Suit from a play by Roger Macdougall, Mackendrick’s
cousin). This was an extraordinarily small percentage. Balcon
describes one such occasion when the studio bought the screen
rights of Amis’s Lucky Jim:

' Jack Whittingham was very keen on it. He went on to write the
script on his own, but I didn’t like the treatment at all. I’m
probably all wrong but I couldn’t bear it; and the general consensus

94 of opinion was that it wouldn’t do, so we sold it.’

(The film was later made by the Boulting brothers.) This was fairly
rare, as most ideas were generated within the group itself, and
development into a script before rejection was therefore usually
unnecessary. Occasionally, ideas offered from outside were accepted.
Pool of London (1951) was one example:

‘ John Eldridge, a talented maker of documentaries, had brought to
Ealing a script for a film about London’s river activities. It needed
to be fictionalised, for Ealing had given up making documentaries
after the war. ... I was now assigned to collaborate with Eldridge
in grafting a story on to his River Thames background * (Clarke, •
op cit. p 164).

Eldridge ended up with a co-scripting credit for this film. What
developed from Clarke’s collaboration was the idea for The
Lavender Hill Mob: Clarke thought it up when he began to research
the idea of a bullion robbery fiction for Pool of London. The
account of Balcon’s reception of this idea shows the degree of
control he had over the studio:

‘ After a long absence Tibby arrived in my office one day with
some sheets of typewriting and a somewhat hangdog look. This,
he said, was an idea for a story he had been working on. I let go
at him. Why the hell hadn’t he been doing what he had been told
to do and getting on with the Pool of London story? When he had
gone I read the sheets he had left behind, and. angry as I was, I
fortunately had the good sense to send for him and tell him to get
down to scripting this new idea without delay ’ (Michael Balcon
Presents . . ., p 160).

Clarke heightens the dialogue in his account:

* He hit the roof. Who the hell was running the studios? What right
had I to decide whether they would make a comedy or a drama?

Was I suggesting that the company’s outlay on the river story was
to be written off as a dead loss? * (op cit, p 165).

Similarly, Balcon’s control over film projects was final:

‘ There weren’t any big disagreements because for good or evil the
final decision was mine. After weighing up the pros and cons. I’d
make the decisions and take full responsibility for them. I’ve no
doubt that I made many mistakes, but nobody could disagree after
that point.’

There is a certain amount of evidence (and a lot more gossip
which tends to divert attention on to a supposed ‘ personality
clash ’) that this veto was exercised rather more on Robert
Hamer’s later projects. His preoccupations were significantly
different from those of the rest of the studio, which is probably

the basis for this gossip. He disagreed \\dth Balcon over the editing 95
of the trial sequence in Kind Hearts and Coronets (see below),
and this dispute became public and heated, whereas in almost all
other comparable cases some kind of private compromise was
reached. There are also hints that he nursed projects which were
not accepted. His answers to a Sight and Sound questionnaire
about ‘ The Film You Would Most Like to Make ’ (1959) are
noticeably different from those of other directors: he talks of a
‘ long-cherished project which at last seems this side of the hori-
zon ’, and then goes on to talk of a film showing judicial partiality.

He concludes this with:

‘ If any entrepreneur cares to permit me to make that film, I can
assure him that I have the proper sources of information available,
subject to the guarantee that they shall be properly used.’

It is obvious that the research for this had already been done (the
film was never made); it is an idea which directly contradicts the
predominant Ealing themes of affectionate support for the forces
of law and order as exemplified in The Blue Lamp and The Long
Arm, It contrasts with the timidity of T E B Clarke, who thought
that The Lavender Hill Mob might have offended the police by
mocking them (see below). But Hamer’s thinking was exceptional
in its antipathy to certain of the studio’s fundamental values. No
vendetta was carried out against him, but this questioning of basic
assumptions made his career at Ealing somewhat uneasy. His atti-
tude to the studio was one of profound ambivalence: he left after
Kind Hearts and Coronets to make The Spider and the Fly for
Rank (edited by Ealing’s Seth Holt), but then returned for several
years. He existed at the extreme edge, but still within, the com-
munity of ideas and assumptions which the studio held.

The examples of Lucky Jim, The Pool of London and Robert
Hamer’s later career are exceptions to the general practice of script
development. Generally, ideas came from wthin the group and
were discussed at the Round Table:

‘ Gradually at these meetings a programme would be developed.

Hal Mason took charge of all the physical aspects of production,
and as a story was built up, I would begin to book the various
artists. In this way the studio programme became more definite
as the scripts themselves developed ’ (Balcon).

Script development was carried out not just by the script depart-
ment, but by the interested parties who were to become associate
producer or director. For instance. Hue and Cry. originally thought
up by Cornelius, its eventual producer, was developed by Clarke
and taken up by Crichton:

‘ “ Corny ” had in mind a picture based on what might be called
the freemasonry among boys, all of them partidpants in that life

96 of semi-fantasy exclusive to boyhood. . . . “ I want to aim,” he said,
” at a sort of situation that only boys are really competent to
handle. I’m completely vague about what it could be, except that
it should have a snowball effect — one boy getting his three or four
pals interested, they in turn roping in other boys at the places
where they work, until eventually we have a tremendous chase or
round-up with boys from all over London taking part

Clarke was assigned to develop this:

‘ My fifteen-page story outline was well received by Cornelius; it
also appealed to Charles Crichton, who saw a film emerging from
it that he would like to direct. The outline and our joint enthusiasm
brought us Balcon’s blessing, though it was impressed on us that
our comedy was obviously going to be unconventional and thus a
risky venture, which meant it must - the word was stressed beyond
mere italics - be made on a low budget ‘ (Clarke, op cit pp 155-6).

This acceptance meant that the film was given a provisional place
in the production programme. Already at this stage the project was
gathering a team. Directors came to a film in a variety of ways: as
Crichton here; as Hamer at the very beginning of Kind Hearts and
Coronets when Michael Pertwee first broached the idea; as Frend
to A Run For Your Money by a simple desire to direct comedy.
From this detailed outline, a draft script was written. At this point,
the final acceptance or rejection took place; if accepted the film
was allocated its place in the production programme, and was
destined to be made: Balcon could remember no rejections or
abandoned projects after this point. This was about six months
before the film was due to take the floor, and a team of staff was
created around the original collaborators. An art director was
appointed (often someone still working on another project): and
a cameraman from the pool who did the screentests from which
a cast was assembled. At the same time an editor was allocated
from the pool, and the composer of the music hired. Finally the
production manager and assistant to director joined. By this stage
the details of production had emerged, and the first-draft shooting
script had been completed. Then as the preceding project took the
floor, leaving ten to twelve weeks to go. the detailed costing and
calculations of shooting time were begun. These were carried out
in discussion with the Production Department, and at the same
time the script was examined in detail by Balcon and by Angus
Macphail, the Script Department Head, for ‘ points of characterisa-
tion, dialogue, motivation and clarity of development *. Most scripts
went through about four drafts before the final shooting script was
completed. At this stage the team was fully assembled; it consisted
of the people who' would follow the film through all its stages,
whereas those working under them only saw the stage they were
immediately concerned with. This constitutes the basic division of

labour, dividing collaborators from ordinary workers.

Sets and costumes were being prepared at the same time. A
distinctive feature of Ealing work was that many directors also
designed their camera set-ups at this point. This practice began
vdth Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), and was borrowed from
Rank’s Independent Frame experiment (which also involved exten-
sive back-projection etc). Dearden wrote in the published script of
Saraband for Dead Lovers, p 66:

‘ During this film we developed experimentally a new system
designed to harness inspiration to efficient production methods.

We decided to develop the lead developed in other industries -
prefabrication. With models and plans we rehearsed the film’s
action in drawings. Each individual shot in the script was illustrated
during conferences many weeks before shooting began, over a
thousand action drawings - or set-up sketches as we came to call
them - were made ’.

As well as collaborating on the script, Alexander Mackendrick was
in charge of designing the set-ups for this film, with pen-and-ink
sketches. He was still using this method when he made The Man
in the White Suit in 1951 (see ‘ The Day in the Life of a Film
Sight and Sound April 1951). This may have been because Macken-
drick was a rather slower worker than average; certainly Hamer
never used such a method, going on to the floor wthout even a
copy of the shooting script in his later years.

A number of other questions were linked with the. designing;
whether to use colour, whether to take shots on location etc. The
decision about colour seems to have been fairly arbitrary. Balcon
says:

‘ I think it arose like any other decision, I can’t even remember

which films were made in colour I think The Ladykillers was;

colour was becoming a thing by that time. But I think it just
developed in the way we came to any other decision.’

He also claims that it did not materially affect the costs of a film.
It was only taken for a minbrity of the films anyway, as colour was
still exceptional, and not considered suitable for war films for
example. The decision about location shooting was more compli-
cated, however. Whisky Galore, made almost entirely on location,
was an exception: it was cheaper to make it on a Scottish island.
Generally, however, it was more expensive to go on location when
two-thirds of the film had to be shot in the studio, which the
technology tended to favour. Location work was best done in a
place which could be isolated and treated as a studio: the bomb-
site in Hue and Cry, the railway in The Titfield Thunderbolt, the
specially-built street in Passport to Pimlico. On Secret People
several such decisions had to be made. For instance, an arrival in
London created these problems:

98 ‘ William [Kellner, the Art Director] is worried about the idea of

an arrival at Victoria. “ This is one of the things we’ll have to think
very carefully about - to get real facilities if you want to shoot at
night. To avoid all that trouble we shifted an arrival at Victoria to
an arrival at Northolt [airport] on The Lavender Hill Mob - very
much simpler; and, as a production point it’ll cost you a tenth of
the price But the social level of the characters makes it too
improbable that they should have flown. Thorold [Dickinson] has
another idea. " What about Gordon Dines [camera]? Hasn’t he got
a steady Eyemo arm? Why couldn’t you get them off an ordinary
train? ” William is sceptical. “ I don’t think it would work. You’ll
have to go to a lot of trouble and expense if you shoot it at
Victoria - lamps, generators, arcs, crowd. People will be crowding
round you ” ’ (Lindsay Anderson: The Making of a Film. 1951,

p28).

Similarly, Paris locations were eliminated because French unions
demanded an equal number of French and English technicians. So
some location shots were re-scheduled for the studio, and sets and
background models were made. The considerations involved in
locations are therefore those of aesthetics (the realism of daylight
shooting and natural settings); those of finance, particularly as
location equipment tended to be bulky; and those of control,
whether it was possible to direct and manage the pro-filmic events
as easily and effectively as in the studio.

6 . Production

‘ The problem of scheduling is briefly this. There is not enough
floor space in the studio to allow one to build all the sets for a
film simultaneously, and shoot the story from beginning to end,
moving from one set to another as the script demands. So a
shooting-order must be devised, by which filming can proceed
continuously one stage after another, while the Construction
Department is given sufficient time between sessions on any one
stage to dismantle used sets and put up new ones ’ (Lindsay
Anderson, op ck. p 40).

The use of the studios in late 1950-1 is shown below:

1950 MAIN STAGES STAGE ONE

Oct Shooting Pool of London (one
stage)

Lavender Hill Mob set building; Tests for The Man in the
shooting begins mid-month White Suit

Nov Extra shooting Pool of London Tests for The Man in the 99
(one stage) White Suit and Secret

Main shooting The Lavender People
Hitt Mob

Dec Lavender Hill Mob ended for Tests for Secret People
Christmas

Set building for The Man in the
White Suit

1951

Jan Man in the White Suit shooting
Feb

Mar Final shooting The Man in the White Suit
Set building for Secret People
Mar 15 Secret People shooting begins

April Secret People main shooting

Extra work on The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the
White Suit after location shooting

May 31 Secret People ends

Pool of London needed extra shooting, so it occupied a stage
whilst The Lavender Hill Mob was being shot. The result was
certain restrictions on space, so The Lavender Hill Mob took ten
weeks rather than the eight probably planned. At the same time,
screentests were taking place on the small Stage One for the next
two productions. The Man in the White Suit took ten weeks in the
studio, and Dickinson’s Secret People eleven. Balcon refers to both
Mackendrick and Dickinson as being somewhat slower than average.

Scenes were not shot in sequence, but according to the dictates of
studio space. As sets were not up for all of the shooting, care had
to be taken to get satisfactory shots, and a certain amount of
covering material for emergencies. This also increased the shooting
time, since only the roughest rehearsals could be made before the
sets were available. So two functions had to be fulfilled before
shooting: shots had to be lined up, and the scene correctly lit (a
certain amount of pre-lighting was done). Stand-ins were used for
the main actors here; then the actors themselves rehearsed on the
set. Finally, several takes were made. This meant that an average
of n\^o minutes’ screen time a day could be shot. This process is
described in an article on the making of The Man in the White
Suit (shooting started around 9.00 am and continued to 7.30 pm):

‘ The first scene is shot in the laboratory set. It contains no more
than half a dozen lines of dialogue - preparing his experiment, the
young man is momentarily interrupted by someone inquiring for
someone else’s office. There are three rehearsals, two takes, in

loo about half an hour. After that, rehearsals for a more complicated
shot. . . . The progression of the sequence is - frontal shot of the
entry of Guinness and Parker, followed by Waters: cut to reaction
shot of the assistant: cut back to Guinness and Parker, followed
by Waters, camera panning with them as they walk. Shots i and 3
are actually filmed in one, the reaction shot being cut in later.
Discussion on correlating the movements of the three actors and
the camera goes on for some time. Chalk marks are drawn on the
floor. The original plan is temporarily abandoned, another camera

position considered, then after two minutes also abandoned

The shot is completely rehearsed before lunch. After lunch, the shot
of Guinness and Parker lined up, the actors make the first take.

" That’s good,” the director comments: “ now let’s make the next
one better.” Two more follow, and the actors pose for stills: a
break follows, while Douglas Slocombe supervises the lining up of
a new camera position at the other end of the set. The actors are
rehearsed, there are three takes, and that is all ’ {Sight and Sound,
April 1951).

This method of shooting dictates the style of the films. At this
point the accumulated technological and human determinants are
finally expressed in the film. The difficulty and length of time
needed to make panning shots are evident. The nature of the
studio, its equipment and its schedules therefore dictated a style of
filming that tended towards short takes and preferred static to
moving camera shots.

Within this framework, the various directors had their own
methods of working. At the extremes are Hamer and Mackendrick.
Mackendrick always used set-up sketches to compensate for the
thoroughness with which he rehearsed the actors. Hamer, how'ever,
did not divide set-up design from rehearsal in his later work:

‘ Of the editor, Hamer has no fears, thanks not only to his own
experience in the cutting room, but also to his ” reactionary ”
refusal to go on the floor with a shooting script. His scripts contain
neither cutting nor camerq instructions. He goes on the floor and
begins by rehearsing the scene in full. In the course of rehearsal,
as the actors “ walk through ” their parts, he believes the cuts and
the camera angles proper to the scene become clear; while at the
same time the method has the huge advantage of familiarity wth
the action when it comes to shooting out of continuity ’ (F B
Lochart: * The Making of His Excellency,’ Sight and Sound 1952).

This may be; but it makes the job of a lighting cameraman very
difficult, as no pre-lighting etc is possible. It is also part of the
screen actor’s profession to know a part in such a way that it can
be shot out of continuity. Thus, even Hamer’s mature shooting
style did not fit into Ealing’s production methods.

With a shooting style determined to this degree, it was possible

for directors to take over each other’s projects: Balcon mentions loi
the help that Crichton gave Mackendrick in the editing of certain
parts of Whisky Galore: the editor Truman taking over Passport to
Pimlico when Cornelius was ill for a time; and Hamer taking over
The Cruel Sea when Charles Trend had appendicitis. But the
directors did not ‘ control ’ projects: the actors (notably Alec
Guinness) had a certain liberty in moulding their roles, although
their general character was* already dictated by which actor was
chosen; the camera crew participated in the composition of the
shots and the lighting. A good performance drew applause from
the technicians. Asked about the degree of participation by the
floor staff, Balcon replied:

‘ This is a very interesting question. I wouldn’t pretend that I had
any contact with the scene-painters; that depended on the
individual units, and I can’t pretend that too much of that
happened. I think the director would discuss his scripts with his
cameraman, his writer, the editor, his set-designer and people like
that. . . . Though there were some exceptions, by and large a
director wouldn’t go all the way along the line discussing anything.’

The viewing of the rushes provided the main opportunity for such
intervention:

‘ There was an arrangement with the union, by which the whole
unit used to give up part of their lunchtime to see the film. It
depended on the director, but if they had any sense they invited
the whole of the working unit to see the rushes. It was voluntary,
but a good unit always did go to see their work.’

Asked if there was any free comment in these sessions, Balcon
replied: ‘ I dare say. amongst themselves. It didn’t come my way.’

It seems that the actual participation was not great.

There were two viewings of the rushes (takes the director had
decided to have printed): Balcon, the film’s editor and Hal Mason
the production supervisor used to see the previous day’s rushes
first thing in the morning. Comments >vere then passed on, if
necessary, to the director. The presence of the editor is significant:
it shows the degree of autonomy and direct contact with Balcon
rather than with the director that the editor had in assembling the
film before cutting. The director participated after this stage, in
assembly of the rough cut. When a unit was on location, it
depended entirely on reports from the studio unless there were
local laboratory and/or viewing facilities.

As much sound as possible was recorded simultaneously; it was
recorded straight on to an optical track usually from a boom micro-
phone. The sound operator had sole control of this process. But
this was only the dialogue; sound effects were usually dubbed in
later. In more difficult or complicated conditions, only a ‘ wild ’
track was taken of the actors at the time of shooting or going

102

through their lines immediately afterwards. This was used as a
guide in post-synching unless it was accurate enough for direct
dubbing.

7. Postproduction

This stage consists of editing and dubbing, the preparation of the
publicity and the treatment by the distributors. Editing took place
in parallel with the shooting. Having seen the rushes, the editor
matched sound to vision, and began to build up a first assembly of
the film. At this stage, he was independent of the director, but in
daily contact with Balcon. After shooting had finished, the com-
plete rough cut was viewed by the director and the editing then
took place in collaboration. The music (already composed) could
not be recorded until the final cut had been made, and was timed
exactly. It was played at Ealing’s recording studios by the New
Philharmonic conducted by the flamboyant resident supervisor of
music. Ernest Irving, a strict traditionalist. The role given to music
was usually secondary and supportative: in the comedies it was
rarely used to convey emotions. Balcon explains the limits of
Ealing’s music commitments very clearly:

‘ The one distinguished composer we did not have success with
was Benjamin Britten, although I discussed with him the possibility
of his writing the score for a film about brass bands (in which he
is, surprisingly, very interested). But Britten takes the view that
music cannot be superimposed, and if it has a place in films it
must be integrated with the film script from the very outset, which
would mean a composer working with the producer, director and
writer from the start. I respect his view, and it is difficult to quarrel
with the concept; I would have liked to put it to the test, but the
problem was to find a sufficient period of time in which we had no
other commitments, and this proved impossible. I hope some other
producer will try out this idea with him, for the results might well
be remarkable ’ (Michael Balcon Presents . . ., pp 147-8).

This is another example of a film which it was impossible to make
because of the nature of the organisation of the studio, despite
Balcon’s obvious liking for the idea.

This is the post-production schedule for Secret People as given
by Lindsay Anderson (op ciC, p 159):

Shooting finishes 31 May

First rough cut for Balcon’s viewing 5 July

Viewing by Composer and Sound Cutting Dept 15 July

Final cut for Balcon’s viewing 27 July

Post-synchronisation by 20 July

Music session by 21 September

Dubbing 25 Sept-9 October

i6 October

103

First synchronised print
Negatives and fine-grain print delivered

to distributors 30 October

Censor’s showing (double head) 5 August.

The post-production stage took about five months. Cutting from the
editor’s first assembly took about four weeks. This rough cut was
then shown and discussed with Balcon, and the final cut took about
three more weeks. The censor was shown a print early, without
the music track.

The participation of the director and producer at this stage was
very much determined by their knowledge of editing. Hamer had
come up from the cutting rooms, and his cutting of Kind Hearts
and Coronets led him to dispute Balcon’s judgment, usually the
final authority in this as in all other stages:

‘ We’d seen his script and we thought it quite brilliant. The only
disagreement came in the editing of the film, with a violent
disagreement between Hamer and me over the length of the trial
sequence. He would not give way an inch or allow a foot of his
film to be cut. He wrote passionate letters to all his colleagues
inviting them to special showings to gain their support.’

Eventually a compromise cut was agreed on. From the slender
evidence provided by pre-production and release-print scripts in the
BFI Library, the argument seems to have hinged around a very
different interpretation of the entire film. In the trial, Hamer
apparently wanted to emphasise the sexual nature of Louis’s pre-
varication between the cold aristocratic woman and the smoulder-
ing doctor’s daughter. Balcon wanted to emphasise the social
nature of the conflict, with Louis’s prevarication being between
two classes (‘ the people * or * the ruling class ’) with the women
exemplifying this choice for him. The final cut keeps elements of
both. This difference and Hamer’s attempt to involve the whole
senior staff show how his attitude differed from the studio’s general
approach. Usually sexual matters remained at the periphery of
Ealing films; Hamer’s battle was to make them more central to
the film.

Once the completed negative had been sent to Rank’s General
Film Distributors, the film was virtually out of Ealing’s control.
But their agreement with Rank ensured an easy passage for the
films: Rank could not re-edit them, and had to release them as
first features. Ealing films were assured national distribution. The
studio retained control of publicity, however. Here there was a
conscious attempt to create a public image for the studio. Several
graphic artists were employed to make a distinct style of poster,
and at one time or another men like John Piper, James Fitton,
Edwin Bawden and John Minton designed poster campaigns which
contrasted strongly with the usual Rank Organisation artwork.

Rank released the films about eighteen months after they had
been originally entered into the schedule: the release dates for the
films mentioned above were: Pool of London. February 1951; The
Lavender Hill Mob, June 1951: The Man in the White Suit, August
1951; Secret People. February 1952. Thus the release dates were up
to six months after the films had been completed, and a year after
shooting had been concluded. Hence it was possible for an Ealing
film to be released into a political and social climate fairly close
to that in which it had been conceived.

The preceding sections have examined in detail the institutional
frameworks in which the film-makers worked. Already certain
limits and a definite style of film-making are emerging from these
determinants, which are at once determinants of technology and
of technique. The whole framework is used by people in certain
relationships who hold certain conscious and unconscious beliefs
about the nature of their specific task and of the society of which
that is a part. The rest of this article will examine these relation-
ships and beliefs.

8. Relations of Production

Ealing had four distinct kinds of employees, and they formed four
different social groups both inside and outside the studio. The
first were the permanent salaried workers: the directors, script-
writers, senior editors, cinematographers etc. They were on long-
term contracts, a rare thing in the industry even then, and ex-
changed job security for lowish salaries. Under them were the
permanent wage-workers, the studio technicians, film cutters, secre-
taries etc. There were also two groups of temporarily employed
workers: those paid salaries like composers, outside scriptwriters,
leading actors, and those paid wages, like the minor roles and
extras, technical advisors etc.

Within the studio, a fairly dose working relationship evolved.
Everyone was addressed by Christian name or nickname:

‘ The practice is common, of course, throughout the dnema - even
more so in the theatre; and it is a good one in so far as it
expresses, or helps to create, a genuine camaraderie of endeavour.

It can be overdone: the prop man on the floor of Quartet who
invited the author to “ have a cup of tea, Somerset " was certainly
going too far. But at Ealing the habit comes naturally. In the words
of a critic, " its films, one feels, are made by a family for the
family ’* ’ (Anderson, op cit, p 159).

This kind of image is common in descriptions of the studio:
Publicity Department Head Monja Danischewsky called his memoirs

Mr Balcon’s Academy, and in interview Balcon slipped naturally 105
into the image of a team:

‘ We were a very free and liberal group, and I think that had there
been a democratic election as to who should lead the side, it’s
probably immodest of me to say that they would have chosen me
to see them through.’

‘ The Studio with the Team Spirit ’ had been painted on the wall
in Dean’s time.

Though this kind of atmosphere was often remarked on by com-
mentators, Ealing’s team still preserved the normal relations of
production of any studio: a top echelon of creative artists and a
large number of employees whose effect over the shape of projects
was very limited. In other words, the studio was liberal rather than
radical, progressive rather than revolutionary. This made for good
union/management relations. Balcon’s Gainsborough had been
affiliated to Gaumont-British (he was later in charge of G-B pro-
duction), and they were the first company to recognise the Associa-
tion of Cine-Technicians (ACT, now ACTT) soon after it was
formed in 1933. The rest of the industry waited until 1939- The
other unions involved in film-making were NATKE (clerical and
construction staff), ETU (electricians). Actor’s Equity and the Film
Artistes’ Association (actors and extras) and the Musicians’ Union.
act’s peculiar strength lay in the fact that they were (and are) the
only specifically cinematic union, and a white-collar union for
technicians. Asked about ACT membership, Balcon replied:

* Everybody was a member I think. The only man they’d let off
(I’m an honorary member) was Hal Mason when he became a
member of the management, but by and large we were ACT
directors’ group. As Hal Mason was such a wonderful person with
man-management relations, we never had a day’s internal trouble
other than national disputes which the union brought about. We
were all on first name terms, that was the beauty of the studio; I .
knew every single working man there.’

Sid Cole, editor and then associate producer {The Magnet, The Man
in the White Suit) was a left-wing militant in ACT.

In the industry generally, the labour/management situation was
not so pacific. In 1948-9 there were eighty-two union/management
conciliation meetings (some dealing with more than one dispute),
and in 1953-4 there were only twenty. In a lecture to the University
of London Extra-Mural Department in 1955, Sir Henry French, for
the British Film Producers, reckoned this to be a sign that:

‘ Both sides have learnt the advantage of settling disputes on the
spot and getting on with making films with the minimum of delay.’

In effect, the producers were asking the workers to carry the can
for the 1948 disaster. As I noted above, union action was there-

io6 fore devoted to protecting the hard-won advances of the war,
rather than towards winning more.

The situation of Ealing’s labour force thus reflected the studio’s
position in the industry: relatively unaffected by the losses
of the giants, Balcon and Mason could maintain good labour
relations, so that no actual stoppages occurred. But Anderson
shows that Balcon’s view is a little rosy: there was never a com-
plete identity of interests:

‘ Most of the unit are late for rushes today as a result of a union
meeting in the lunch hour to discuss the application for
membership by a junior scriptwriter who has been working in the
studio for three years. The application, which had support from
above, is rejected; “ They were trying to swing something on us ”
seems to be the general feeling in the little knots of discussion
which collect on the floor before shooting starts in the afternoon ’
(op cit, p 116).

Union membership would have enabled this scriptwriter to become
a technician: the refusal was based on the argument that at that
time there was 50 per cent unemployment in the industry. The
division between * them * and ‘ us ’ is clearly marked, and ‘ them ’
includes the whole group of senior technicians. It ;s also noted
that * most of the unit ’ went to the meeting. Also symptomatic
of the real situation is the way in which Balcon’s ‘ we ’ constantly
shifts from the whole 400 employees to the senior group of fifty.

This differentiation is reflected in the way the different groups
related outside the studio. Here also there was little interchange.
The creative elite used to go to the pub across the green, the Red
Lion, to discuss the state of play in the studio. Balcon rarely W'ent:

‘ I largely used to leave them to themselves in the evening; so they
could tear me to pieces if they wanted to, and get it off their
chests and come back the next morning.’ Meanwhile the average
studio-floor worker used to ‘ toddle off back to his semi ’ in the
words of a BBC news cameraman who now uses the studio. He
claims that many of the staff still work there. Stranger, perhaps
is the lack of contact betwreen actors and senior technicians. Balcon
quotes Michael Redgrave:

* He may deny this, but I don’t think that Balcon likes actors; I
base this comment on observing that there are no actors among
his close out-of-studio friendships, and that - being a good
producer - he believes in the film per se and does not (whatever his
commercial leanings) really believe in the star system.’

Balcon concludes: ‘ I swear I don’t dislike actors, even if some of
my best friends aren’t ’ (Michael Balcon Presents . . ., p 225).

Promotions, too, took place from a certain stratum of the'
studio, as Charles Barr’s analysis of the nucleus of directors clearly
shows. And since this group in practice had the greatest influence

on the creation of the films, the next sections will deal with their 107
beliefs.

9 . Realism

‘ Hue and Cry had a quality of reality, in addition to its fun, that
the public were now prepared, even eager, to accept ’ {Michael
Balcon Presents . . ., p 159).

Ealing Studio’s post-war productions were innovatory within realist
cinema. The films were recognised as fresh and new, and yet at the
same time were easily watched and enjoyed by the mass audience.
This is because their innovations preserved many of the funda-
mental methods of classic cinema (preserved them as part of the
unconscious practice of the film-makers): they shifted the terrain
of, but did not alter, the basic aim of realism, that of showing the
world as it ‘ naturally ’ appears to be. Within the cinema, this
means a use of language which seems to be invisible, natural but
in fact has its own history, and is also massively sustained as
natural by its perpetual repetition through the dominant modes of
both news and entertainment. As Burch and Dona put it {After-
image n 5, 1974. p 57):

‘ From the earliest days of the cinema, the whole thrust of
ideological discourse was directed towards camouflaging the
discontinuities (cutting and framing) inherent in the motion picture
image, a thrust which achieved its initial and decisive successes
between 1904 and 1914 with the constitution of the laws of
spatio-temporal orientation, directly generated by the need to
transpose into this new “ scene ” the representational conceptions
of classic Western theatre and the novel of the nineteenth century.
One of the main elements sustaining linear discourse was to be,
of course, the invisibility of the shot-change . . .*

This language is not the expression of a society and its inhabitants
in the process of their social construction; rather, it shows charac-
ters who are full and finished, living as the centre of the social
totality. This carries with it a certain mode of watching, which
confirms the viewer’s own idea of her/himself as a coherent entity;
that is. as the subject for the ideological formations which make
up the text. This process is a complex and double-sided one of
recognition and misrecognition. It is recognition in that the viewer’s
idea of self does actually correspond with the representation, and
thus in this sense the representation contains an element of
‘ truth ’. It is misrecognition in that this practice of recognition
instantly puts the subject into an already-defined situation; he is
inserted into a given structure, a structure which, in Jacques-Alain
Miller’s words, ‘ puts in place an experience for the subject that it
includes Thus the representation of the consistent and finished

io8 character confirms the viewer in his position as subject for ideo-
logical formations. And this is the effective role of ideology: it
exists to produce this category of subject in order to reproduce the
relations of production.

But this is not a monolithic process: it may be that this mode
of inscription is an impossible one for a revolutionary art.'but it
is itself fissured and full of contradictions. In any film, the com-
plicated process of recognition-misrecognition takes place in a con-
text where a narrative form is being used to pose certain real
(ideologically defined) problems and to reach some resolution or
reintegration of their conflict. It is possible for real social problems
to be posed in this mode, and this was Ealing’s purpose: to make
the real world seem worth living in. The very way in which this
purpose is posed shows that it is open at once to a reactionary
tendency (that of social control), and a progressive tendency (that
of showing as full individuals those people who had previously
been denied any real individuality: the lower middle and working
classes). In 1943, Balcon stated this purpose very clearly. He gave a
paper entitled ‘ Realism and Tinsel ’ to the Workers’ Film Associa-
tion in Brighton and described Ealing’s new project, an alliance of
documentary and entertainment film-making. He concluded by
quoting the Documentary News Letter:

'“The way in which we make the real world seem exciting does not
matter. . . . But whatever method is used it must be to the point
that men and women welcome the idea of living in a real world.

It is only knowing it truly and honestly that they can work and
play in it happily. With the knowledge of that real world they can
have such a full life that all of man’s heaven from Mt Olympus
to Hollywood, California will seem less than the dreary emptiness
of a ballroom in the morning sunlight. People will see that the
world itself is rich enough and noble enough to provide for all
their needs.’* That sums up what I feel about films today so much
better than I can phrase it myself.’

In 1974, Balcon is far more guarded about such statements, but
when pressed about what -he felt was the purpose of his film-
making, he said that ‘ a lot of people say that they were a force for
good in the world Historical forces had made a public ‘ prepared,
even eager ’ to accept this project (and their varied readings of it),
and the film-makers existed who wanted to undertake it. But such
was the history of this class of intellectuals, that their particular
way of undertaking this project was distinct from the American
(Welles/Wyler/Toland) or Italian Neo-Realist method. Ealing’s pro-
ject retained the invisible language of the classic cinema (of Holly-
wood narration) with certain reservations, but was innovatory both
in the use of locations, of realistic settings and lighting: in the
way in which it attempted to show social groups; and by the
decision to show the lower middle class. The particular historical

reasons why the project took this form are investigated below, 109
but first it is necessary to see how it functions within the realist
text.

The use of specifically filmic language (the mechanism of the
narration) can be shown by applying Christian Metz's ‘ grande
syntagmatique ' which divides a film up, not according tor each
shot-change, but by the groupings of shots into recognisable units:
autonomous segments. An analysis of Passport to Pimlico showed
that it has eighty-five autonomous segments, the bulk of which
(numerically and in terms of running time) consist of the three
types of linear narrative syntagms (definitions quoted from Stephen
Heath: ‘ Film/Cine text/Text,’ Screen v 14 n 1/2, Spring-Summer

1973):

1. Eighteen scenes - ‘ a series of images offered as spatio*
temporally continuous ’ - which could have been taken in one shot,
but are complicated by the use of close-up etc. Most of these are
fairly short.

2. Twenty-eight ordinary sequences ~ ‘ the common form of
sequence in which the discontinuity is simply the omission of
moments judged unimportant * real time ’ is subtly condensed
whilst still appearing natural; the location is always the same, the
action takes place in one recognisable area. These form the longest
parts of the film.

3. In addition, there are ten shot-sequences, entire scenes taken
in one shot. These are usually quite short.

4. The last type of linear narrative syntagm is slightly different.

It is the episodic sequence, of which there are only four in this
film. It has neither the unity of time nor that of place shared by
the others; it is a collection of events that take place in the order
shown, but with gaps of space and/or time between. These are
marked off from the less condensed sequences, as are

5. the seven bracketing syntagms - ‘ a series of brief shots repre-
senting events and situations offered by the film as typical samples
of a particular area of reality without any specification as to their
temporal interrelation ’ — a list of examples like those presented
when the water supply is restored to Pimlico: watering the flowers,
filling an aquarium, washing hair, taking a drink.

Both these types of sequence, the episodic and the bracketing, are
isolated from the rest of the film by cross-fades instead of cuts,
and by the use of music to accompany them. They appear fairly
regularly, punctuating the film, providing bursts of music and
collapsed narration. In addition to these types of syntagms, there
are certain others with specialised functions:

6. Fourteen explicative inserts, mostly shots of newspaper head-
lines near the end of the film, where the narrative is particularly
condensed; two displaced diegetic inserts, explaining something

110 about to irrupt into the main scene; a non-diegetic insert, an
ironic dedication to the death of clothes rationing; and two alter-
nating syntagms. a phonecall showing each of the speakers, and
a more complicated case of a mock-newsreel (complicated in con-
struction) alternated with and interrupted by shots and cries from
the children watching. (There seems to be no adequate category
in Metz’s typology for a sequence such as this, where a form of
cinematic language is shown as such, placed in quotation marks
and mocked.)

Two-thirds of the segments in the film, and considerably more
than a half of the running time, are segments which keep a unity of
time and place: scenes, ordinary sequences and shot-sequences.
These approximate as nearly as possible to real time, and they do
not have music dubbed onto them, whereas the segments which
advance the narrative between these stretches of real time are
covered by music. Music is used to bind together disparate
sequences, and to mark off these punctuating sections. The score
therefore consists of six short themes, the longest being that
assodated with Pimlico, usually coimoting its success, and the
others being two fanfares, a playful tune, a theme for continuous
action and a cumulative theme. There are no motifs* associated
with individuals. The classic 1930*5 use of music to amplify and
define psychological states is entirely absent. So the love scene
between Shirley and the Duke can mock the conventions of the
stereotyped romantic situation; the swelling strings are replaced
by squabbling cats. Emotion is provided by the context, actions
and expressions of the actors, not by musical connotations.

The third distinction between this style and other dominant
styles can be deduced from those kinds of segments that are not
used at ^ 1 . There are no trick effects; no subjective inserts (the
dreams or premonitions of one character); no parallel or descriptive
syntagms which present typicalities outside a temporal sequence.
The realism of the film therefore consists in denying any subj'ective
information which cannot be deduced from the ‘ outside ’ of a
person, and in making every image concrete and directly related
to a specific situation. This sense of the concrete is carried further:
the linear progress of the images is heightened, the discontinuities
of time and place are bracketed and flattened by the use of music
into brief * notes ’ which merely carry narrative information.

This method of filmic narration is very similar to the classic
HoIIy^vood use: a highly developed shooting and editing style which
nevertheless appears natural. This was already inscribed into the
very technology that Ealing used, and the techniques which were
applied to its use. But it would have been possible, using even this
equipment, to have made greater stylistic innovations. However,
this did not suit the purpose of the people working at the studio,
and their use of specifically cinematic language only refused certain

techniques in order to make the whole fiction seem super-real and m
concerned with one concrete situation.

Their innovations were principally on another level, not that of
the specifically cinematic language used, but that of the languages
brought in from outside. To apply Stephen Heath’s useful defini-
tion. ‘ in film, what is important to analyse is the particular he'tero-
geneity of languages it subsumes •- its combination of codes - and
the particular forms by which it achieves this subsumption - its
coherence ’ {Screen v 15 n 2, Summer 1974, p 128). The * freshness *
of Ealing’s realism lies in the way in which lower-middle-class and
even working-class styles and experiences were introduced into the
filmic discourse, not for parody, or as objects of concern for the
main characters (the form of Saville’s South Riding, seen as pro-
gressive in 1938), but as people who can act and whose actions are
a fit subject for fiction. Screen has called Hamer’s It Always Rains
on Sunday ‘ one of the few worthwhile films about working-class
London ’ (v 13 n 2. Summer 1972, p 51). and it was Balcon’s pro-
ject to show * real people There were also attempts to portray a
social totality within the narrative form, either in the omnibus films
like Train of Events,* or in the numerous films about cohesive
social groups: Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore, The Titfield
Thunderbolt, etc. This portrayal of the ‘ lower orders ’ was
paralleled by a new way of signifying ‘ this is real ’ in each shot:
no longer is the background there merely as an ever-present con-
notation of * carefree luxury * as it is in The Philadelphia Story
and many other Hollywood social comedies; nor is it that of
‘ romantic history ’ as in Les Enfants du Paradis. The background
had to carry part of the signification ‘ this is real life Two quota-
tions open out into a definition of how this process worked and
how it was experienced. The first is from the Evening Standard
review of Passport to Pimlico: ‘ The studio sets never carry the
fresh conviction of the camerawork actually done in the East End ’

(April 28, 1949), and the second from Balcon a few months before:

‘ The thought struck me when reading a critic’s appreciation of a
new film in which he praised the newsreel effect ” of the camera
work. Where are we going, then, with this overinsistence on
realism? If we are going to rely on camerawork faking the effect of
actuality filming in order to create an on-the-spot illusion of
realism, if the employment of amateur actors is done not for
reasons of necessity or faute de miewc but, again, for an artificial
effect of realism (“ Look, dear, you can see he’s a real soldier
because he obviously can’t act for toffee! ”) then what is to happen

4. An interesting case: the story about train-drivers (perhaps Sid Cole’s
section) is conspicuously more powerful than the standard melo-
dramas about a flirtatious conductor, a murderous actor and a
paranoid refugee. It is probably these three plots that prompted
Balcon’s embarrassed comment * that the film should never have
been made

112 to the film as an art form? Surely, we shall be back again to the
original revolt of the artist in films against the mechanical literal
eye ’ (Saraband for Dead Lovers, p ii).

The illusion of reality in this particular kind of realist film is
guaranteed by photographing real objects, rather than a studio art
director’s remoulding of objects. It provides a different kind of
‘ language no longer is the controlled, stylised poverty of the
image supplied by the great art directors of 1930’s Holljav'ood
quite enough to guarantee the illusion. A sufficiency of non-doubled
objects and people (things present but not ‘ speaking ’, like ser-
vants, the poor, and blacks, as well as chairs and chandeliers), a
sufficiency which defined ‘ reality ’ in these films now gives way
to a new sufficiency, that of the more elaborate casualness of real
life, where objects have the appearance of having been used, and
people of having a biography. This biography may not be spoken in
the narrative, but it is there, spoken in their appearance and style
of acting. This is at the root of Balcon’s distinction: that the bio-
graphy of a person has to be super-added to whatever actions they
perform, this being precisely the craft of acting rather than of
being. The Evening Standard reviewer perceived exactly the dis-
tinction between realisms. The studio’s set manufacturers were
still slightly behind this trend, still painting backdrops: in Pass-
port to Pimlico the backdrop in certain studio scenes is still meant
to be read as a shorthand sketch of what is outside, even though
the lighting style is deliberately given the quality of a location shot.
This is the 1930’s attitude, to sketch a luxury against which the
complexities of psychological narration take place. However, in
this film the backdrop should not have been painted, it should
rather have been a photograph like the Eiffel Tower scene in The
Lavender Hill Mob. A new superfluity of information was needed,
a social backdrop and not a psychological one; a different amount
of non- doubled coding to support the fiction as real because it
claims a different reality, a faithfulness to concrete social situations.

The way in which this was thought through further illuminates
Ealing’s film-making practices. The discussion of a project seems to
have centred around the ‘ idea ’, the comic disruption it showed,
or its message about humanity. Hamer’s argument with Balcon
about the cutting of Kind Hearts and Coronets is one example;
another is Balcon’s hindsight condemnation of his decision to allow’
Monja Danischewsky to make the musical comedy The Love Lottery,
scripted by an American and starring David Niven. He says it was
‘ the transplanting of a Broadway type into an English atmosphere
... an absolute complete and utter failure ’. The questions asked
about a project were whether it was convincing enough: whether it
was a saleable genre or not. A community of ideas existed about
cinematic language: there were no discussions of large-scale issues
of cinematic style. But these issues were faced and discussed at

specific points in the making of films, and a large amount of teach- 113
ing did go on within the group. Here Cavalcanti w’as particularly
important. He was a Brazilian who had made several influential
silent films in France, and later came to the GPO/Crown Film Unit
in 1933. He joined Ealing iri 1941 and stayed until 1947 as asso-
ciate producer and occasional director (see the interview with him
in Screen v 13 n 2. Summer 1972). Balcon counts him as a great
influence because he knew the potential of film language (exempli-
fied by his almost expressionist sequence for Dead of Night), and
because he was a good teacher;

‘ I just don’t know how he influenced people; but if he talked with
someone like Dearden who was directing, somehow a different idea
of a shot would emerge. It wasn’t any schoolmastering way, he
understood films and he talked films: he knew about them.’

The shared style which emerged from those years of development,
when only Balcon and Cavalcanti had had any previous sustained
experience of film-making, was a realism which tended almost
deliberately to adopt flat camera angles, a neutrality of composi-
tion. Seth Holt’s Nowhere to Go is. as he intended, * the least
Ealing film ever made ’ for this reason: it uses the spare, stylised
images of a Losey. These images draw attention to themselves,
they communicate something other than * this is reality ’. The
intention of Ealing’s film-makers, however, was to show the Real
as naturally as possible; and in the comedies this meant that they
could investigate disruptions within this reality.

10 . Comedy

‘ Personally. I am very attracted by comedy, or rather by a certain
kind of comedy. ... It lets you do things that are too dangerous,
or that a certain audience can’t accept ’ (Alexander Mackendrick
in Positif n 92, 196S).

Ealing’s comedy, the kind of film with which the studio is most
popularly identified, fits into this natural assumption of film as
the language of the real. There seem to be two kinds of comedy;
first that which is aware of language and works by deconstructing
and recombining it, the comedy of gags, of illogicality and incon-
gruity: and second that which rests on a natural language and
instead deals with social disruption. The first is that of a Tashlin
or a Chaplin, the second that of Ealing or of a Preston Sturges.
The distinction cannot be rigidly maintained, as elements of each
appear in the other: Ealing comedies all use various gags. Chap-
lin’s comedies all had a social edge which the passage of time
and idolatory has only served to blunt. But it is a distinction which
is fruitful: Paul Willemen has convincingly demonstrated that
Tashlin’s films are ‘ intricate networks of quotes, parodies,

114 pastiches, satires ’ which function through the combination of
elements by ‘ addition, subtraction, multiplication, juxtaposition,
condensation etc *. He argues that the formal quality of these gags
is their dominant feature; although the codes which are combined
together are those of the normal social discourse, the way they are
disrupted is more important than their social implications:

‘ A classification according to the type of combination is perhaps
more fruitful in the case of Tashlin, because these procedures are
dominant, and the combii^tion of different codes is always
secondary in this type of comedy. As far as this type of comedy
goes, it is not of primary importance to note that speech, effects,
music and image are being combined; these kinds of combination
appear in almost all types of film. Comedy is generated principally
by the type of combination used - illogical, incongruous, breaking
the laws of verisimilitude etc ' {Frank Tashlin, Edinburgh Festival
1973, p 125).

The kind of disruption of language identified with Tashlin is not
present in Ealing work: there are hardly any gags like the one he
contributed to the Marx Brothers’ Casablanca where a cop finds
Harpo leaning against a wall and asks sarcastically if he’s propping
the building up; Harpo nods, and when the cop angrily pulls him
away, the building collapses. The nearest equivalent is the sequence
in The Lavender Hill Mob where the gang melt down the gold and
each shot of each action is accompanied by a radio news bulletin
full of puns about gold/melting-down/towers/escape. Here, the
whole gag submits to and furthers the logic of the narrative (on
one level it is another way of disguising the massive temporal
discontinuity involved). It is not enjoyed, in other words, for its
demasking of language as the Tashlin gag is: there it has no narra-
tive function whatsoever. Gags are used in the Ealing comedies in
this way in order to show that they are comedy, so it is the films
which seem most to evade this label (eg The Man in the White
Suit) that have the most comic routines. Chase sequences function
in a similar way, by expressing in its clearest form the basic
tension of the film through a set of formal statements of challenge
and escape, like the chaos the crooks cause in The Lavender Hill
Mob by stealing the inspector’s car for their get-away.

Ealing comedy rather belongs to the type which deals with the
disruption of social reality, something that is often defined as the
safe playing-out of * base urges ’: the enactment of desires that
are not socially sanctioned. This applies as much to hatreds and
utopian desires as it does to sexuality: comedy is the space in
which these motivations can be revealed and played through. This
produces a disruption of the surface tranquillity of existence, and
this disruption is sometimes expressed in the disruption of codes
that produces laughter, in unexpected twists and logical incon-
gruities etc. But the basis of this kind of comedy is the way in

which it deals with feelings which are not quite socially sanctioned. 115
The outer edges of this space are defined by the limits of sub-
version: comedy which ‘ gets too close to the bone ’ is that which
deals with desires which cannot be integrated. Then it transgresses
into the area of the other, the area of experience which is totally
excluded from civilisation at that particular moment. Comedy has
to effect some kind of reconciliation between the desires it deals
with and the society which these desires are disrupting: this at its
weakest is the kind of integration that takes place at the end of
Some Like. It Hot, where Jack Lemmon in drag is being carried off
to marriage by an ageing millionaire. Lemmon tells him ‘ But I’m
not a woman the millionaire replies with a broad grin ‘ Well,
nobody’s perfect’. Here the then scatalogical theme of homo-
sexuality is integrated on a personal level only. This is the most
flimsy acceptance permitted; comedy is progressive in that it reveals
the partially repressed areas, the areas of unease, tension, guilt,
of potential change, but in the end it has to effect, in the reading
preferred by the film-makers, some kind of re-integration. Yet this
can be an uneasy confirmation of traditional values even within the
preferred reading. In the readings of a corporate or oppositional
class this integration can be lost or ignored.

Ealing’s comedy does not deal with resentments or ‘guilt so
much as with aspirations and utopian desires. It is not primarily
concerned with satire, which can be identified with the playing out
of class resentments, illustrated during 1940-9 by the films of
Preston Sturges. Here, the central values of American society are
tom apart from the point of view of those who do not succeed,
the large majority of the working and lower middle classes. Hence
in Christmas in July (1940), ambition is shown to succeed through
a mixture of luck, bombast, self-centredness and other people’s
idiocy, as the naive and selfish Dick Powell is cormed into believing
his terrible slogan has won a contest. He then gets respect and
material rewards where he had previously been snubbed, until he
is found out. Then, he really wins the contest. ... In Sullivan’s
Travels (1941) a director of lavish musicals wants to find out
about ‘ real life ’ and systematically has his romantic precon-
ceptions shattered by the degradation of brute poverty. He ends
up in a chain gang, and just before he is rescued he goes to a film-
show with the other convicts and finds that laughter at cartoon
gags is their only release. He learns to take back his old place in
society as entertainer: the ending confirms the established social
order. But en route, life for the poor has been shown in a way that
only a handful of Hollywood films (even from studios independent
of the bankers) managed to do in the 1930’s (eg 1 am a Fugitive
from a Chain Gang), very different from the weak populism of a
film like The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Where Ford wanted to adul-
terate the starkness of the Steinbeck novel, Sturges, by using satiri-
cal comedy, could produce a film showing the inescapable logic of

ii6 poverty for the unemployed and semi- employed within the American
system. This demonstrates exactly the space of comedy within
fictional discourse. It allows a faithfulness to real conditions when
these conditions are ‘ better off ignored ’ in the eyes of the
dominant class; but this faithfulness is gained at the cost of
reaffirming the system (economic and moral) which produced the
situation. Neverthless. it opens an area where a different self-
recognition by these oppressed people themselves can take place.

Ealing does not deal with such resentments and class differences,
whether expressed in satire or in slapstick (cf Chaplin’s Modem
Times etc). As Balcon says:

‘ I don’t know that we were consciously influenced by anybody.

If I can mention Chaplin in the same breath as Ealing, then I know
that our approach to comedy was altogether different from his. . . .
We were all tremendous filmgoers, but I don’t think we w^ere
consciously influenced by what we saw; of course, we were
tremendously impressed by Preston Sturges’ work.’

Ealing’s comedy style was new in that it dealt with the utopian
desires of the lower middle class rather than its resentments.
Certainly, resentment played a part in the working of the comedy
(‘ Who hasn’t wanted to kick the bureaucrat in the pants ’ wrote
Balcon). but it was not its main emphasis. Rather this style dealt
with the consequences of that resentment when it was played
through; these consequences were the release of subterranean
values. These values, and their playing-out in a specific area in a
limited amount of time, constitute the * fantasy ’, the affectionate
‘ whimsicality ’ often noted in the Ealing comedies. They are values
which are felt to be lacking in lower-middle-class life, either denied
or under historical pressure. The expression of these fringe values,
the ideals of community which tend to be denied by the facts of
a competitive, status-conscious middle-class life, produce the more
progressive comedies. Hence in Passport to Pimlico, resentment
about rationing produces an expression of the utopian desires for
a self-regulating independent community; in Whisky Galore, it is
the compensatory ‘ golden age ’ dream of an anarchic self-govern-
ing community before the arrival of the more individualistic pre-
sent. These values are expressed through the disruption of the
social order, a disruption that is made possible by certain resent-
ments. Hence also the aspirations for a different class status are
expressed, in The Lavender Hill Mob through robbery and in Kind
Hearts and Coronets through murder. The more reactionary
comedies spring from the regret for those ideals which are seen
as being swept aside by the forces of history; it becomes a more
nostalgic and sentimentalising comedy, best shown in The Titfield
Thunderbolt.

The expression of these values is only possible because of an
initial disruption - hence Balcon’s definition of the comedies as

‘ real people in impossible situations Impossible not because they 117
lead to stalemate, but because they cannot occur. The situation
makes comedy possible, whether it be a sudden discovery that
disrupts (Passport to Pimlico, The Man in the White Suit), or the
encroachment of outside interests and powers (Whisky Galore, The
Titfield Thunderbolt, Barnacle Bill). The result is what Durgnat and
Balcon both call ‘ anarchistic precisely because it expresses the
shadowy desires and aspirations at the margins of bourgeois
thought. This definition differentiates Ealing comedy from that of
the Boulting brothers (who made Lucky Jim after Ealing rejected
it). Balcon. making the comparison, says: ‘ Our comedies were done
with affection ... in a sense the Boulting comedy had a sharper
edge to it, and was unkinder The Boultings tended to deal with
satire and class conflict; Ealing dealt with aspirational, utopian
comedy, and so substantively only with one class. The idea of
affection links the impetus with the idea of the acceptable dis-
ruption of established beliefs and institutions. Balcon is firm
about the limits of Ealing’s willingness to show the shortcomings
of the State or of morality: * Barnacle Bill might defy the White-
hall planners, but Michael Balcon told Ken Tynan he could never
make a film which profoundly criticised such British institutions
as the army ’ (Raymond Durgnat: A Mirror for England, p 38).

This is paralleled by T E B Clarke’s account of how one night he
was arrested for breaking in when he’d forgotten his key:

‘ “ Says he wrote The Blue Lamp." the man on the beat concluded.

..." Then aren’t you the same one that wrote The Lavender HUl
Mob - the film that takes the piss out of the police? ’’ The frying
pan had given way to the fire. I had to admit it. “ Just a bit of
good-humoured fun ’’ I equivocated. " Now don’t you play it

down! - it was great It’s a long time since I enjoyed a picture

like that last one of yours. Just what w’as needed - somebody to
take the piss out of the job! ’’ I knew then I really had reason to
feel proud, for I had not let my old force down ’ (op cit, p 169).

This demonstrates exactly how little resentment was thought to be
permissible amongst the studio staff, no matter how radical they
might be in private. But from this kind of restriction a different
kind of comedy was created, one which dealt more with aspirations,
what the reviewers called ‘ fantasy ’.

A multitude of logical incongruities are bom from the initial
disruptions that give rise to the comedies. The gags and routines
are secondary to this, and as the comedies lose their social impetus
(and a large part of their popularity) the gags become predominant,
most obviously in Who Done It. a playing through of stereotyped
slapstick situations. Mostly however, the comedy is bom out of the
complicated negotiations between the established order and the
disruptive forces. This determines the diverse amusements of
Holland suddenly thinking of himself as gangleader (The Lavender

ii8 Hill Mob); of Pemberton calling for law and order when he had
explicitly rejected it only the night before {Passport to Pimlico);
of Louis’s cool justification of his multiple murders (Kind Hearts
and Coronets); of the mutual incomprehension of the Scots and
businessmen in The Maggie where neither can understand how the
others can be so stupid, because they use different logics.*

The basis of the comedies lies in the way that they play out
the fringe ideals and subterranean values of the class to whom their
preferred meaning is directed. The comedies are, therefore, amusing
rather than to be laughed at out loud. It is a fond amusement, the
recognition of these utopian ideals and shadowy values when they
are played out in a limited space. The disruption of the normal
order is possible so long as its expression is always local, localised
in a specific place for a specific length of time for a well-defined
group of people. The recognition has to be within these limits for
it to be acceptable and not too disturbing. But for audiences with a
different class background from that of those whose sympathies lie
with the preferred reading, these values and ideals have a different
weight. They may already find a considerable degree of expression,
as with the ideal of community, which is the normal mode of be-
haviour in an organic working-class community. The comedy then
takes on a different character. It is no longer a comedy of fantasy
but of fact; it is no longer a comedy in which, for a short time,
recognition of the shadowy areas of belief can be expressed, but a
comedy where normal ways of behaving are shown and are causing
disruption and defiance of those who do not behave that way. So
the weight of the defiance in Passport to Pimlico or Whisky Galore
is very different for working-class and middle-class audiences. For
one it is fantasy, whimsy; for the other it is an expression of real
potential.

11. Social and Political Ideas

' By and large we were a group of liberal-minded, like-minded
people. I don’t know if anyone was terribly politically involved,
we were film-makers: it was our life, it was our total life ’ (Balcon).

* Real people in real situations ’ is not simply proposing a certain
kind of cinematic style, it is equally a social proposal: the people
shown have to have convincing psychologies and belong to a
recognisable class. A complicated set of ideas about both cinematic
technique and social relevance is impacted into this one idea
because it was not the habit of film-makers at this time to reflect
overall about what they were doing. The issues were thought
through in terms of an instinctual response to specific problems, so
cinematic realism emerged as transparent precisely because it was
not thought of as language, but as the efficient duplication of the
real. The same process is found with social ideas. Balcon has

evident difficulty in thinking of the films in terms of their class H9
position; he is much more used to seeing them in terms of the
‘ idea ’ they express, as shown in his interpretation of The Matt
in the White Suit:

' The relationships of management and labour are not dealt with
in depth. It’s more concerned with the question of processes, and
the search for a synthetic substitute; it bears a relationship to
that kind of research today.’

Mackendrick sees the film in more psychological terms:

* I’d like to make another “ hysterical comedy ” like The Man in
the White Suit which is my favourite film. A man lives in a social
group. This group seems normal and he abnormal. Little by little
you realise that it is he who is full of good sense. In a psychotic
world, neurotics sometimes seem normal ’ (interview in Tositif n 92,
1968).

Similarly. T E B Clarke writes of Passport to Pimlico in terms of
its comic idea rather than of the type of people involved (op cit,

PP 159-61). The concern of the studio staff was to elaborate the
entertainment rather than to give a social view. So the latter was
not thought through consciously, it was a matter of what ‘ felt
right ’, and what the staff sympathised with. Balcon gives a basic
statement of their class position:

‘ If you think about Ealing at those times, we were a bundle . . .

(I’m not saying this in any critical sense), we were middle-class
people brought up with middle-class backgrounds and rather
conventional educations. Though we were radical in our points of
view, we did not want to tear down institutions: this was before
the days of Marxism or Maoism or L6vi-Strauss or Marcuse. We
were people of the immediate post-war generation, and we voted
Labour for the first time after the war; this was our mild revolution.

We had a great affection for British institutions: the comedies were
done with affection, and I don’t think we would have thought of
tearing down institutions unless we had a blueprint for what we
wanted to put in their place. Of course we wanted to improve them,
or to use the cliche of today, to look for a more just society in the
the terms that we knew. The comedies were a mild protest, but not
protests at anything more sinister than the regimentation of the
times. I think we were going through a mildly euphoric period
then; believing in ourselves and having some sense of, it sounds
awful, of national pride.’

Elsewhere he has described his own background as ‘ Gladstonian
liberal ’ from a ‘ respectable but impoverished family ’. The idea of
liberalism covers two related political tendencies, both of which
are evident in Ealing’s staff. The first is that of the nineteenth-
century Liberal Party, an uneasy alliance of progressive political

120 forces, the backbone of whose support was the Noncomfonnist
petty bourgeoisie. It was the party of peace, prosperity, free enter-
prise and decency. One of its basic tenets was tolerance, the ability
to see both sides of the question, an attitude which informs the
preferred reading of The Man in the White Suit. Growing from this
during the twentieth century was the liberalism of the g'eneration
after Balcon’s,- that of most of the studio staff. They experienced
early in adult life the effects of the depression and the rise of
fascism. The reaction to these conditions amongst the liberal
intelligentsia was a certain radicalism, a radicalism which had not
developed during the earlier period of labour militancy immediately
after the First World War. It was a radicalism bom out of
humanitarianism, a response to a failure of the system rather than
a challenge to it. Its most concrete expression was a commitment
to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War: Ivor Montagu. Sid
Cole and Thorold Dickinson were all in the unit which made Behind
the Spanish Lines and Spanish ABC in 1938. Dickinson was also
on the 1937 ACT delegation to Russia. The pro-Spanish-Republican
spirit pervaded the GPO film unit, as Cavalcanti shows in the Screen
interview (v 13, n 2, Summer 1972). The limits of this radicalism
are demonstrated by the post-war careers of these people: there
was an acute suspicion of the left as somehow dehumanised (the
product of Stalinism), which led Dickinson to make Secret People.
viciously condemning a group which attempts to assassinate a
fascist dictator. It also leads to comments like Balcon’s ‘ Ivor
Montagu was a great character, no douht a member of the Com-
munist Party, but he was the sweetest, nicest, gentlest man that
ever happened ’. Balcon’s own attitude to political affiliations is
that they were none of his business so long as they stayed outside
the studio:

* Mary Kessel used to sell the Daily Worker, but we had an
arrangement with her that she would sell it outside the studio gate
and not inside. This was the kind of atmosphere, it was much
milder. There was Baynham Honri. our technical supervisor, and
another technician, Eric Williams, who were arch-Tories, but the
men used to pull their legs.’

Almost all of the studio staff had come from comfortable
middle-class backgrounds, qualitatively different from the lower-
middle-dass one they portray. Many had had some form of higher
education: Hamer, Clarke, Crichton and Frend at Oxbridge; Mack-
endrick and Relph at art colleges: Cornelius, from South Africa,
went to Max Reinhardt’s academy in Berlin and to the Sorbonne.
Others were from theatrical backgrounds: Dearden, Holt, Relph.
Most of them participated in the radicalisation of the intelligentsia
in the 1930’s, and' voted Labour in 1945. There was certainly a
more political atmosphere during the War; asked whether the
senior staff participated in the swing from Labour in 1950. Balcon

replied: ‘ I wouldn’t have been particularly conscious of it at that 121
time. One was obviously conscious of it during the War because
one talked of the world that one had to face in post-war times.’

This radicalism consisted of a rejection of the anarchic capitalism
identified with the depression in favour of a State-regulated
system; also, in the arts, it leaned towards the portrayal of ‘ real
people ’, a tendency marked in the cinema by a rejection of what
Hollywood was supposed to stand for. But film-makers of this
class background and with the demands of entertainment to
fulfil conceived of ‘ the people ’ in a very distinct way, not as
factory workers, an amorphous mass with whom they had little
or no contact, but as that more public echelon of shopkeepers
and clerks, the petty bourgeoisie. These were people who were
easy to observe unobtrusively (Anderson recounts how they sat
in the Soho caf6 that was the model for the caf6 in Secret
People ‘ observing the clientele ’), and were known to be familiar
to the whole audience. But this in itself is not enough to. explain
the concentration on the petty bourgeoisie: it is also a concentra-
tion on the point of exchange rather than the place of production:
as Charles Barr put it. ‘ the small catering establishment ’ is a
‘ social melting-pot ’ which occurs very frequently in British
films {Screen v 15 n 1, Spring 1974, p 117). This is precisely
because the point of exchange is the only point in capitalist society
where social relationships are expressed. They are not expressed
in production, because production itself appears to be like an
exchange, of ‘ a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage ’ etc. The
relations of power and of privacy are thus only expressed in
exchange:

‘ The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are
indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social
bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each
individual’s own activity or his product becomes an activity and
a product for him; he must produce a general product - exchange
value, or, the latter isolated for itself and individualised, money.

On the other side, the power, which each individual exercises over
the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the
owner of exchange value, of money. The individual carries his sodal
p>ower, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket ’ (Karl Marx:

The Grundrisse, Penguin Books, pp 156-7).

This means that the only point in the social process at which
individuality is fully expressed is at the point of exchange; to
express psychology and to show individuals, entertainment will be
biased towards this class and this area when it wants to show ‘ the
people *. Unencumbered by such an impulse, it can go ahead and
show those sections of society whose wealth makes it possible for
them to develop their psychological processes to the full. This was
the drift of Hollyvrood in the 1930’s, a drift which Balcon and

122 Others explicitly rejected because of the War. The multitude of
difficulties in showing the process of work and maintaining the
demands of entertainment and psychological development at the
same time are well known. The only Ealing film to attempt this
leans heavily on the moment of exchange for its justification: the
stalemate in The Man in the White Suit that makes the invention
unacceptable is the result of the endless circulation of exchange;
if everlasting products were made, this system of always-expanding
reproduction of need would be short-drcuited. There would be
nothing for the workers to do, and no more return on capital. In
this film as well, although the setting is industrial, there is still no
portrayal of workers working. The only work-process shown is the
individualised process of bosses and researchers. Workers are not
individuals in as much as their work deprives them of individuality
and therefore of ‘ dramatic interest

Thus the concentration of Ealing’s films on the lower middle
class is a result of a complex of factors. The first is biographical:
the majority of the film-makers were bom into middle-class
families, many strongly imbued with old-fashioned liberalism,
which expressed the class interest of the emergent lower sections
of the bourgeoisie. They were of the generation which passed
through the depression and was radicalised by it, producing a desire
to show ‘ the people ’ in films. Both personal knowledge and the
demands of entertainment narratives confirmed them in the choice
of this class fraction as the area of interest. The development of
Ealing comedy is closely linked to the complex history of this class
fraction since the War. Balcon agreed with the identification of
this interest, but was extremely hesitant about calling it a con-
scious attitude:

‘ I suppose that we resented the fact that everybody had treated
what you call the lower middle class as types; and I think we

attempted to treat them, oddly enough, as human beings I

think we probably found them easier to deal with.’

In The 18 th Brumaire, Marx described the petty-bourgeois party
in the French Assembly of 1849 as follows;

* Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives
of the petty bourgeoisie are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic
champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their
individual position they may be as far apart as heaven from earth.
What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the
fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which
the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently
driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which
material interests and social position drive the latter practically.

This is, in general, the relationship between the political and
literary representatives of a class and the class they represent.’

In just the same way, the Ealing creative elite, themselves mem- 123
bers of the middle echelons of the middle class, came to make
films in sympathy with lowest strata of that class.

This sympathy is expressed in a certain moral attitude: ' Nothing
would induce us to do anything against the public interest just for
the sake of making money.’ This is at once a personal "and a
political morality; it refuses any infringement of the national moral
norm, or that moral norm which is assumed to be national, and
at the same time refuses any contradiction of the demands of the
state. No real revolution can be advocated, and no serious criticism
of national institutions of power (judiciary, army, parliament etc),
except that which is sanctioned by comedy. But it is in the role
of women that Ealing’s strict morality was and is most remarked
upon. There have been many films which have seen the police as
a natural force for good in society as do all Ealing films, but few
studios that have consistently dealt with women in such a restric-
tive way. Most criticism of Ealing’s morality, however, equates the
role of women with that of sex, eg Bryan Forbes’s ‘ Sex was buried
with full military honours at Ealing ’ (Evening Standard review of
Hollywood, England). But the matter of sexuality is only the most
visible manifestation of the petty-bourgeois idea of femininity.
Women are seen as the repositories of moral valuesj and it is
therefore no accident that they are less in evidence in the comedies
than in the serious dramas, as even Balcon will admit. Since
comedy involves the infringement of ideals and accepted structures,
it is possible for men to be involved, but not women. This is
equally evident in matters of property as of sexuality. The robbery
films (The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers) are remarkable
for the lack of women; the old lady in The Ladykillers is the single
exception, and her importance lies precisely in the way that she
is inviolable, a moral absolute. Equally in Whisky Galore the
women are marginal to the actions; in Kind Hearts and Coronets
the action concerns Louis’s prevarication over which woman he
wants as his, or rather his attempts to possess both. It is the
standard ploy of ‘ men act, women appear ’, a widespread attitude
which is more a product Of patriarchal than of capitalist society.

But it is an attitude which has a different form in the different
material and ethical fields in which it is expressed. So the petty-
bourgeois ideal is that of the ‘ little woman ’, the woman who
exists as an ignorant housekeeper and spiritual comfort. It is a
matter of the particular way in which the separateness of work
from home, and of the privacy of the home come to be dealt with.

In short, it is a matter of the cultural space of a particular class
fraction, and the available modes of subjectivity for women within
it. As petty-bourgeois roles are defined in terms of a ‘ private life ’
rigidly isolated from social life, attitudes towards sexuality (the
private acts at the heart of private life) best define the available
range of attitudes. Not mentioning anything that goes on within

124 ‘ the sanctity of marriage anything of the details of either per-

sonal life or of sexuality, are attitudes more typical of a petty-
bourgeois mentality.

Balcon has summed them up as follows:

‘ I have come to the conclusion that if, as it appears, there has •
been a sex deficiency in the films for which I have been responsible
over the years, no great or permanent damage has been done, as
current films are more than making up for lost time. It could be
said that my films were also deficient in violence. But I reflect that
there are many things in life other than sex and violence. There’s
love, for instance, but then I suppose if I bring up that absurd
word I ought to define what I mean by it. I shall not attempt to
do so, but merely say that what I mean by it is not very fashionable
at the present time ’ (Michael Balcon Presents . . ., pp 265-6).

These attitudes are most rigidly evident in the family scenes of
The Magnet. Yet at the same time, the scriptwriter of The Magnet,
T E B Clarke, includes in his autobiography a number of dirty
stories about his sexual exploits at Cambridge and elsewhere,
stories which could never have appeared in Ealing films. Clarke’s
smutty stories are the obverse of Balcon’s idolisation of women as
emotional objects: both give women a subordinate or nod-existent
role in the sphere of action and intellect. Perhaps most revealing
here is Clarke’s account of how Margaret Rutherford got the role
of the eccentric professor in Passport to Pimlico:

‘ We were upset by the news that Alistair Sim would not be
available. Who else could be half as good in the role? After the
names of a dozen actors had been put forward and discarded.

Corny had a brilliant thought. Why must the character be a man?
Why should Prof Hatton-Jones not be Margaret Rutherford? ’ (op
cit, p 161).

This ‘ brilliant thought ’ was to regard a woman as capable of
thinking intellectually, even in such an eccentric mould as this.

There is only space to give a schematic sketch of the preferred
meanings of the individual comedies which emerged from this
process, and of the historical location of those meanings.® The
history of the comedies is closely bound up with that of the lower
middle class in this period (1946-57). The first group of the films
released between February 1947 and November 1949 (Hue and
Cry. Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore. Kind Hearts and Coronets,
A Run for Your Money) are made in a period when the urban petty

5. A much more detailed account, including a historical reading of
Passport tp Pimlico, may be found in my MA thesis.

bourgeoisie was facing a new style of capitalism and state inter- 125
vention after the experience of the War. During the War. they had
some experience of running their own communities (the experiences
of the Blitz and of the Raid Wardens who had to act auto-
nomously underlies the declaration of independence by one street in
Passport to Pimlico), and had participated in the general upsurge
of radical feeling during 1941-2. They were now faced by an in-
creasingly monopolistic capitalism, which was beginning to displace
one of the forms of petty-bourgeois existence, the small shop or
other enterprise. It was also abolishing the long-held distinctions
between the labour aristocracy and the mass of the working class,
thus eroding petty-bourgeois values in urban areas and amongst
the working class. Along with this there was the tentative socialism
of the 1945 Labour Government, which much increased state inter-
vention and regulation of industry and commerce; but which, at
the same time, had to revitalise British capitalism by a vast export
drive, directly subsidised by preserving wartime restrictions and
thus keeping the level of home consumption low.

In this context, the lower middle class had a lot to grumble
about as well as certain remembered ways of fighting back, of ac-
tive resistance. It is these forces which feed into the early comedies.

Hue and Cry exploits a genre (gangster comics), but introduces a
new class fraction and the disruptiveness of kids. Passport to
Pimlico and Whisky Galore both deal with groups that revolt
against the restrictions of rationing. In the first, a London street
finds that it is in fact a part of the Duchy of Burgundy, so declares
independence and freedom from rationing. The spivs invade; they
are blockaded, and eventually a compromise is worked out with
the British government. This is a direct rehearsal of the complaints
and power of the lower middle class, as well as the limits of their
differences from the dominant ideology at that point. It represents
both an airing and a partial incorporation of the radical patriotism
thrown up by the war experience. Whisky Galore deals with a
more extreme move: the open defiance of British authority and the
theft of rationed whisky by a self-sufficient community. This action
therefore docs not take place in a directly lower-middle-class situa-
tion: the revolt is that of a Scottish peasant community which
expresses values at the fringes of middle-class experience, those of
a group which co-operates rather than competes, and from which
personal identity is drawn.

Kind Hearts and Coronets expresses, on one level, the aspirations
for a higher class status, and poses the limits of the class system
as shop-worker and Duke. In this system, it is the aristocracy that
has the power, and uses it emptily, and the petty bourgeoisie who
have the dynamism to keep the system alive. Louis tries to com-
bine both. A Run for Your Money is a much less successful film,
tangling together several narrative threads intended to demonstrate
the positive openness of the Welsh miners against the various

126 forms of London self-interest or oppression.

The next three films were the products of changing historical
circumstances. Rationing and state control relaxed and the con-
sumerist society began to develop. At the same time came the
Cold War, with the real threat of another world conflict. The
Korean War caused a brief annual inflation rate of ii per cent;
it was a short period of gloom and despondency to which Ealing
responded with three comedies: The Magnet (October 1950), The
Man in the White Suit (August 1951) and The Lavender Hill Mob
(June 1951). The Magnet shows the life of a middle-class boy
afflicted by pangs of conscience, and the ludicrous interpretations
put on this by his psychologist father. It was not successful: the
retreat into the home was not so much at fault as the kind of
home that was chosen. The family life Was excessively privatised
and repressed. The Lavender Hill Mob, on the other hand, was a
great success: it used the stable formula of the robbery film and
introduced into it tw’o distinctively lower-middle-class characters,
a clerk and a small manufacturer, as the villains. The robbery genre
began to express real and legitimate social unrest and aspiration,
avoiding the polarity of snivelling (working-class) petty crook and
charismatic big gang leaders. The Man in the White Suit has
already been discussed: its preferred reading is one of deadlock in
British industry, a product of human stupidity.

After these films, the nature of the petty bourgeoisie and of its
ideology began to change. The impact of the consumer society, with
a brief boom after the Korean War and the development of the
mass-consumer market with techniques such as advertising and
HP not only drove a wedge between lower-middle-class and work-
ing-class interests, but also split the lower-middle-class fraction
itself. Consumerism (a simple label for a complex historical pheno-
menon) offended certain traditional middle-class values: those of
the taboo on pleasure, the saving ethic, and the privacy of home
and family, areas which were extensively invaded by an aggressive
consumerist capitalism. There have been two kinds of reaction:
either a retreat into defensive suburban reaction (cf Mary White-
house), or an embrace of these new values, accepting and worrying
at this new-style capitalism.

As the lower middle class and its ideology were in the process
of change, Ealing’s response was uncertain. The series of comedies
made show few attempts to state the basic problems, and a general
retreat into entertainment values. Two exceptions are The Titfield
Thunderbolt (released March 1953) and The Maggie (February
1954). The first is a reactionary use of the idea of community,
where the semi-feudal village rallies round to save its railway and
to repel the forces of modem capitalism, variously represented by
unions and monopolistic coach owners. This is clearly supported
by the bourgeois myth of the country as a place ‘ free ’ from
capitalist stresses. The Maggie again uses the Whisky Galore image

of rascally Scottish peasants, but pits them against a new-style 127
neurotic American businessman, * Americanisation ’ was a popular
image for the process overtaking Britain in the 1950’s, and its
statement in this film avoids the crudities of a simple rejection
or acceptance of peasant or business ideologies.

Other comedies were Meet Mr Lucifer (December 1953). The
Love Lottery (February 1954), Touch and Go (October 1955), The
LadykUlers (December 1955). Who Done It? (March 1956) and
Barnacle Bill (November 1957, made at MGM). I have not seen
Touch and Go; The Love Lottery was Ealing’s only musical comedy,
a satire on the grosser aspects of Hollywood star production and
consumption. It was made at a time when the genre was at its
least popular. Meet Mr Lucifer deals with the impact of TV in its
early days, centring its critique around the idea that because so
many friends invited themselves around to watch, the private
sphere of the home was disrupted. This was 'a transitory phase in
the spread of TV: its ubiquitousness soon began to reinforce the
structure of the nuclear family. The LadykUlers and Who Done It?
both exploit established genres and cliches, but very differently.

Who Done It? plays through stereotypes of detective fiction and
slapstick as a mere reiteration; The LadykUlers condenses the
language of gangster genres (using several different ‘ types ’), and
then plays them off against another stereotype from elsewhere:
the little old lady. Barnacle Bill is another aspect of this retreat
into entertainment values: it revives Ealing’s own formula of the
lower-middle- class group against the power of authority, but it
was by then a formula which had lost its social edge, especially
when applied to the decayed aristocracy. The lower middle class
were no longer engaged in that kind of conflict, and were pro-
foundly divided over the issue of whether to preserve or move
forw’ard in a way which this film could not be used to express.

This has only outlined the preferred readings of these sixteen
comedies; most of them have different working-class (and some-
times dominant) readings, readings which have to be explored
before the texts are fully understood. Corporate working-class
readings have been outlined for some of the comedies, but it is
the purpose of this article to show how the preferred reading of a
film must be established within the contradictions of the dominant
ideology before these other readings can be fully understood. And
this can only be done by looking at the production of the films,
at where the accumulated determinants of industry, technology,
organisation, technique and social attitudes coincide with and
contradict the dominant ideology.

128 FUm Culture

Edited by Alan Lovell

Walsh an Author?

Take a small book, issued in an edition of two thousand copies,
written by a set of people whose names lack any of that inevit-
ability which success and fame confer. An event which one would
take to be of small importance and certainly not one which would
attract the attention of mass circulation newspapers, let alone tele-
vision. The book issued by the Edinburgh Film Festival to accom-
pany their Raoul Walsh season last Autumn fulfils all the require-
ments of the opening sentence - yet it was vilified at length in
most of the ‘ quality ’ newspapers and even achieved the distinction
of being literally discarded on television by Barry Norman after he
had spent five minutes of ‘ prime time ’ pouring scorn and ridicule
on it. Such over-reaction, such an outpouring of affect, suggests
that the book constituted some serious threat to things held very
' dear and very near by that group of people who constitute the
opinion formers of our British film culture. It would take too long
to investigate properly the nature of the threat and the reaction
to it; the reading of cultural symptoms would take us too far
afield. I will limit myself to a few remarks at the end of this review
which might suggest how one would start that reading. Rather than
dealing with the symptom I would like to deal with the rationalisa-
tions offered by those opinion formers for their outburst and
examine them in relation to the book.

Before starting, and as I may seem rather critical of the texts I
discuss, I would like to state plainly that the Walsh book is one
of the most interesting and fertile books that has ever been pro-
duced on the cinema. The articles by Buscombe, Willemen, and
Cook and Johnston all open up absolutely vital new ways of trying
to understand the cinema and, indeed, Willemen’s text I am con-
vinced will become a classic model of the analysis of a film.

The critic who most fully articulated the reasons for his dislike
of the book was Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, and I would
like to take his objections as the starting point for this review.
Basically they can be reduced to two. Firstly that the book
was absolutely unsuited to fulfil its main function - that is.

to accompany the Walsh season and serve as an introduction to 129
Walsh’s films - and secondly that it is dedicated to a glorification
of the director as author, who is thus turned into the Living God
of the cinema. Both these points are in fact substantial ones and
indeed they are inter-related. It is certainly true that the book is
absolutely unsuitable as an introduction to Walsh. The articFes are
disparate - bound together by no real common concerns - despite
the rather frantic attempt to link them by Phil Hardy in his intro-
duction, But more than that, they are in parts quite needlessly
difficult. Willemen’s text is probably the most striking example
of this: a large number of Lacanian concepts are used in the
analysis, with only the most elliptical explanations to introduce
them. The problem of doing advanced theoretical work and yet at
the same time attempting to make this work accessible to a wide
audience is not an easy one to solve, but simply to avoid it is to
lapse into a very dangerous intellectual elitism which will finally
have a very damaging effect on the work itself being done. The
practice of both Freud and Marx is exemplary here, where an effort
to popularise and make available the results of their theoretical
labours went hand in hand with those labours themselves. Screen
itself is faced with this problem, and it would be generally agreed
that it has yet to find an adequate solution. But difficulty' may often
be the product of a real theoretical problem which is being masked
and covered over, and in the articles here presented that problem is
undoubtedly the problem of the author. The book is presented as a
set of essays on an individual director’s films and the first article by
Peter Lloyd is a traditional piece of author analysis. In this article’s
view, the works are produced autonomously by the author Walsh
and the films are to be judged in terms of a certain coherence which
the work attains - a coherence which is assessed in terms of the
truth of that coherence in relation to the author’s internal world or
to the author’s view of the external world. We have here the classic
bourgeois view of art which has, hopefully, already been demolished
by Screen. The author cannot produce his works autonomously
because he can only work in a production situation which involves
other people and in a set of social relationships, and his film can-
not spring fully fledged from his head but must be articulated in a
language of film which is no more created by him than it is created
by any individual. The interest of film lies not in some mythical
coherence but rather in the productive contradictions within the
work (this is shown clearly in the book by the analyses of Pursued
and The Revolt of Mamie Stover) and films carmot be judged in
terms of truth - based as such a notion is on the film as repre-
sentation or expression - but rather of the work that the film
accomplishes on ideology and the positions it allows the viewer to
take up.

If all the articles in the book were like Peter Lloyd’s, Andrews’s
second criticism might be justified, but they are not. His failure to

130 perceive the utterly different problem of author that arises in the
rest of the volume suggests a failure even to attempt to read it.
If we do away with the author as a secular version of God. this
does not mean that we can dispose of that awkward body (or, in
films, bodies) which constitute the locus of discourses and prac-
tices within which the film is produced. Or rather we get rid of
these bodies only at the price of falling into an abstract formalism.
Paul Willemen’s article provides an example of how such a formal-
ism can become tempting. Willemen analyses the film Pursued in
terms of the presentation and working out of a fantasy of the
‘ primal scene ’ - that event, real or imagined, in which the child
observes his parents in the sexual act. Concentrating on certain
areas of tension within the narrative structure, Willemen breaks
down the narrative flow of the film to disengage a constant travers-
ing of the problems of the CEdipal situation.

‘ Although Pursued contains rhetorical procedures to provoke an
illusion of inexorable but smooth progression (eg the abundant
use of dissolves for transitions, the overall circularity of the
narrative constructions etc) the entire text is in fact one field of
criss-crossing chains of semantic and expressive motifs, of
permutations and shifts within one triadic structure oil the model
of the CEdipal situation, with most of the signs functioning
simultaneously.’

It is beyond the scope of this review to follow fully the working
out of this analysis; suffice to say that it is exemplary in its rigour
and its determination that no element will be considered which
is not overdetermined by its appearance at more than one level of
the five matters of expression or its repetition on a given level.
What, however, does constitute a problem is the location of the
fantasy. Willemen writes:

* In the introductory sequence. Jeb is constituted as narrator,

Thorley as narratee. However, by intro ducting these functions after
the visual discourse has be^n going in the non-person for five or
six shots, the question arises as to who was speaking before Jeb
took possession of the narration, thus retroactively destroying the
illusion of the non- person narration. As Jeb commences his first
person narration, he constitutes himself as the subject of an
utterance which in its turn is embedded in an utterance, the
subject of which is seen as being present in the guise of a
non-person. Jeb in this way functions as the locum tenens of the
subject of the film discourse. All the reader knows about this
subject is the series of letters spelling out the name of the
organiser of the discourse, ie the name of the director as given in
the credits, not to be confused with the interviewable person
Mr Raoul Walsh * (pp 70-71).

But here Willemen is engaged in a theoretical sleight of hand - 131

the subject of the discourse is not a set of letters but the body
that upholds or supports the filmic chain of discourse - first the
director (or those who construct the film) and then the viewer who
traces the articulations as he watches and understands the film.

There are thus two theoretical possibilities open to us. One, and
this is the traditional Freudian approach, is to locate the fantasy
firmly in the author and in his individual existence - it is this
approach which leads to the ridiculous procedure of trying to
explain texts in terms of supposed events within the author’s life.

The second possibility, which exists as a theoretical possibility, if
not an actuality, is to locate the fantasy in the reader. Willemen
hesitates between these two positions in an attempt to create a
third alternative in which the fantasy would exist independently of
material support as a structure with certain positions for the
subject - which positions exist independently of the fantasy’s
site of production. Before trying to resolve this question let us see
how the same problem arises in Edward Buscombe’s article.

Buscombe is concerned to attack the conventional wisdom that
‘ by the beginning of the thirties Holl3Avood was totally in the
hands of big business ’ (p 52). He shows, in a piece of historical
analysis of the kind which, on a much larger scale, is indispensable
for any Marxist theory of the cinema, that, in fact, Warners was
not controlled by big business and that the relative radicalism of
its films can be partially accounted for by this fact and the
political preferences of Jack Warner. Buscombe points out that the
existence of a house policy * must call into question the simple
notion of Walsh as an auteur who dictated the style and content
of his pictures ’ (p 59), and he ends his piece with the following
rather hesitant comment:

‘ If the tendency of these remarks is to make Walsh disappear
behind the collective persona of Warner Brothers, this is not wholly
the intention. The argument is not that Walsh brought nothing to
his films, but only that working for a studio with as distinctive a
policy and style as Warners imposed a number of constraints on
any director. Yet these constraints should not be thought of as
merely negative in their operation. Working for the studio meant
simply that the possibilities for good work lay in certain directions
rather than in others ’ (p 60).

Buscombe has raised a problem which he himself seems unable
to answer. What is the relation between the individual body and
the particular position that it occupies in the itself contradictory
productive process? To suggest that the only relation is one of
‘ constraint ’ or the less perjorative ‘ direction ’ is to fall into a
liberal view of the individual, whole and autonomous, moving freely
within circumscribed areas laid down by society. Once again it is
the author which creates a problem that can only be evaded by

132 a vacillation.

Pam Cook and Claire Johnston’s article comes nearest to pro-
viding the solution to Willemen and Buscombe’s problem. At the
end of their article, having rehearsed the arguments against the
author, they state:

‘ A view of Walsh as the originating consciousness of the Walsh
oeuvre is, therefore, an ideological concept. To attribute such
qualities as “ virility ” to Walsh is to foreclose the recognition of
Walsh as subject within ideology. The feminist reading of the
Walsh oeuvre rejects any approach which would attempt to
delineate the role of women in terms of the influence of ideology
or sociology, as such an approach is merely a strategy to
supplement auteur analysis. We have attempted to provide a
reading of the VValsh ceuvre which takes as its starting point Walsh
as subject within ideology and. ultimately, the laws of the human
order. What concerns us specifically is the delineation of the
ideology of patriarchy - by which we mean the Law of the Father -
within the text of the film ’ (p 107).

This then is the other answer to the problem of the author.
Psycho-analytic tools can be used in the analysis of an author’s
work, but the work exists neither in some psychic va*cuum nor in
the unknowable details of the author’s personal life, but is based
and finds its support in the dominant symbolic orders — which
can be identified through an attention to other artistic and social
practices - and in those constant areas of pressure on the symbolic
order which can be found repeating themselves in the subject’s
filmic discourses. Similarly the problem of the change of the
author’s position in the process of production should find its
identification in certain changes in these repetitious forms of
pressure.

Obviously this schematic formulation is easier stated than put
into practice - the amount of work to be done is both of enormous
quantity and of a very different kind than that heretofore carried
out on the cinema. Literary examples are perhaps provided by
Walter Benjamin’s studies of Baudelaire (NLB, 1973) and Julia
Kristeva’s examination of Lautr^amont and Mallarm^ in La revolu-
tion du langage poetique (Seuil, 1974). The articles by Willemen,
Buscombe, Johnston and Cook do, however, mark a very definite
starting point for this work for film. But if Cook and Johnston
produce the most correct account of the position of the author in
the analysis of film and if, for the most part, their analysis of The
Revolt of Mamie Stover is of a very high quality, their theoretical
presuppositions about women in film suffer from a certain ambi-
guity throughout the article. For the authors a patriarchal society
attempts to reduce women to signs in which male sexuality can be
communicated and expressed. Talking of Marlene Dietrich in
Manpower, the authors write:

‘ Marlene Dietrich is depicted as only having an existence within 133
the discourse of men: she is “ spoken ”, she does not speak. As
an object of exchange between men. a sign oscillating between the
images of prostitute and mother figure, she represents the means
by which men express their relationships with each other, the
means through which they come to understand themselves and
each other ’ (p 85).

The problem raised by such an analysis of women as signs is the
confusion between how a patriarchal society wishes to represent
women to itself and how women actually function \vithin such a
society. The danger is that an analysis of woman as sign will be
accepted that entails the position that there is a definitely defined
male sexuality which can simply find expression and also an already
existent female sexuality which simply lacks expression. The article
seems to hover between this position and a more complicated one
in which w'omen function as the repressed overdetermined moment
of patriarchal society, constantly constituting a danger which would
break the whole structure and allow another space to open up in
which desire could find another scene on which to act. In part
this ambiguity is the ambiguity of Walsh’s own films, but the lack
of a clear distinction between the attempt to make W'omen func-
tion as sign and the reality of the ‘ trouble ’ that women cause
within the patriarchal system constitutes a vacillation in the text.

The result is that at certain moments a simple expressive notion
is used as the criterion for a feminist criticism.

Hopefully, even this brief review has indicated the wealth of
material in this small book and the extent and range of the
theoretical question that is opened up. So why the outraged roar
of pain and anger from those luminaries of British film culture.?

Two brief suggestions: (a) The position of the Barry Normans,

Philip Jenkinsons et at is based on a division of labour. The
scholars, academics and researchers turn up interesting pieces of
information which the popular intellectual can select from in order
to convey what the dumb pedant didn’t have the wit to realise he
was producing. The Walsh ‘book is useless within such a division
of labour — the facts and analyses being produced are very heavily
, dependent on the theoretical structure in which they are articulated.

Thus a certain threat of a fall in profit makes itself felt as the
earlier part of the process refuses to produce the raw materials
necessary (cf the present battle between the producers of raw
materials and the ‘ developed world ’).

(b) The intellectual quality of the articles in the Walsh book
and the concomitant work being produced in such journals as
Screen and Afterimage raise a certain spectre over film studies. The
real danger that film studies cannot be extricated from Freud or
Marx, or rather (for Freud and Marx can always to a certain
extent be academicised) from the real political struggles of the

134 present, constitutes a decisive threat to the liberal petty-bourgeois
interest in film. In this respect it is interesting to note that the
one article passed over in complete silence by the reviewers has
been Cook and Johnston’s. Screen may very well have a lesson to
learn from this. A more active involvement with the actual areas
of struggle in the cinema - particularly the increasing use of film
as agit material — might be a method to ensure that our interest
in Freud, Marx and Saussure cannot fall back into a recuperable
academicism.

Colin MacCabe.

Feminist Film Criticism: A Reply

I would like to follow up a number of issues raised in the piece by
Christine Geraghty in ‘ Film Culture Screen v 15 n 4, and to offer
a further context for those issues.

The article reviews some of the recent developments in feminist
film criticism and writing on the cinema, in particular issue 3/4
of Women Sc Film, a Californian journal of feminist film criticism,
Claire Johnston’s article in the Screen pamphlet Notes on Wo)Jien’s
Cinema, and the Pam Cook and Claire Johnston article in the 1974
Edinburgh Film Festival book, Raoul Walsh.

Christine Geraghty’s article seems to lack a certain dimension.
The context for feminist film criticism is clearly political. Arising
out of the struggle of the women’s movement against male domin-
ated structures in society, it is concerned to understand and
describe how those structures, discerned and elaborated in a variety
of writing by women, operate within art and the media and in
particular within film. It is not simply a question, as Christine
Geraghty says regarding Women <S: Film, of ‘ attacking male views
of women as expressed in film *, but of attacking oppressive repre-
sentation of women in films, which are normally made by men.
The oppression of such representations is now beginning to be
articulated and described, as is shown in the quotations included
in Christine Geraghty’s article. The narrowness of the roles avail-
able to women in films; the paucity of films which centre on a
female protagonist; the refusal to women of an independent sexual
identity, and the use of women instead as sexual signifiers. sexual
objects through which male sexuality is expressed and validated.

This is coupled with a re-evaluation of women’s contribution to
cinema, as film-makers and writers, and with a struggle to obtain
control of the media, particularly through the making of films.
This is not only because women desire to communicate with each
other, but because it is a necessary strategy in the struggle against
sexism that women -intervene in the area of the dissemination of
ideology.

As Christine Geraghty rightly says, there are no easy answers as

to the relationship between art and ideology. It is in any case clear 135
that the ideological content of films is mediated in a complex and
indirect way. Claire Johnston in fact focusses on this problem in
her essay in Notes on Women's Cinema, clearly placing film as an
ideological product, in which not even the technology is neutral.

Thus, as she says ‘ It is idealist mystification to believe that
“ truth ” can be captured by the camera or that the conditions
of a film’s production (eg a film made collectively by women) can
of itself reflect the conditions of its production . . . new meaning
has to be manufactured within the text of the film Further, the
sign is always a product: ‘ What the camera in fact grasps is the
“ natural ” world of the dominant ideology. Women’s cinema can-
not afford such idealism; the “ truth ” of our oppression cannot
be “ captured ” on celluloid with the “ innocence ” of the camera:
it has to be constructed/manufactured ’.

Nevertheless, ideology cannot be eliminated but can only be
countered, as Claire Johnston suggests, through the creation of
new meanings ‘ disrupting the fabric of the male bourgeois cinema
within the text of the film ’; a counter-cinema whose ‘ function is
to struggle against the fantasies, ideologies and aesthetic devices
of one cinema with its own antagonistic fantasies, ideologies and
aesthetic devices ’ (Peter Wollen, Afterimage no 4, Autymn 1972).

A counter-cinema not because it is created by ‘ someone who is
oppressed ’ (Geraghty p 92), but through the articulation from a
consciousness of oppression of a critique which is an interrogation
of ‘ the language of the cinema/the depiction of reality ... so that
a break between ideology and text is effected ’. It is from the
position of counter-criticism that Claire Johnston looks at Arzner
and Lupino, which is not to deny their differences, as Christine
Geraghty suggests, but to foreground the nature of their (different)
interventions as women film-makers in Hollywood cinema. Suggest-
ing from this the development of strategies for a subversion of the
workings of myth in Hollywood cinema through, in relation to
Arzner, the use of crude stereotyping to generate within the text
an internal criticism of it. Or, as with Lupino, in the way in which
‘ reverberations within the narrative, produced by the convergence
of two irreconcilable strands - Holly\vood myths of woman v the
female perspective - cause a series of distortions within the very
structure of the narrative ’.

Hawks, Ford, Lupino and Varda can all * present such different
views of w'omen * (Geraghty p 92) which does not negate the
ideological nature of the technology (and techniques) of bourgeois
cinema as Christine Geraghty suggests. Rather it arises precisely
because, as Claire Johnston has argued, that bourgeois cinema can
be challenged through the very mechanisms of its own working,
through the myths it creates, by * a dislocation between sexist
ideology and the text of the film ’. Which is surely the counter-
cinema elaborated by Peter Wollen who, in referring to Vent d'Est

136 says ‘ In some respects this may bring it closer - or seem to bring
it closer - to the cinema it opposes than Vent d’Est would suggest ’
(Afterimage no 4).

Claire Johnston’s article in the arguing of its position remains
speculative. Much more work needs to be done on the work of
women film directors, and on the interaction of myth and 'signify-
ing structures (that is, between myths of women on the one hand,
and the mode of production of meaning within a film on the other),
and hopefully the forthcoming Dorothy Arzner season at the
National Film Theatre will present an opportunity, particularly as
a booklet on Arzner is planned to appear at the same time (to be
published by the British Film Institute). Nevertheless a basis for
such work is created in this article, which precisely attempts to
confront the issues which as Christine Geraghty points out, are not
explored in writing elsewhere.

But feminist film criticism has not remained static. It is useful
to see the ways in which it has changed since Women ^ Film first
appeared in 1972. At that time the force of feminist criridsm was
directed outwards and was, as Christine Geraghty points out, a
description and indictment of women’s roles in male-dominated
cinema. Recently it has diverged and become more complex. The
latest issue of Women <Sc Film (no 5/6, 1974) deals *almost ex-
clusively with films made by women. This is a logical development,
a result to some extent of women’s film festivals where women
have been able to see and discuss not only the films of the past
but women’s films now, made under the impact of the women’s
movement. As a result Women Sc Film has come to deal with the
theory and practice of women’s film-making, moving away from
the ‘ consciousness-raising ’ analyses of images in men’s films
which Christine Geraghty criticises. In fact Women Sc Film has
made an important contribution to the development of feminist
study of the cinema by publishing filmographies, interviews and
histories of women film-makers.

At the same time, Pam Cook and Claire Johnston’s analysis of
The Revolt of Mamie Stover is a development of feminist film
criticism in dealing with the traditional male film. Rather than
exposing sexism in such films as part of a ‘ consciousness-raising ’
of women (and men), they suggest a theoretical structure by which
to understand Mamie Stover. Confronting the way in which tradi-
tional cinema is per se fetishistically structured, they use their
analysis of Mamie Stover to write about the cinema itself.

It is the nature of the function of female roles that is the centre
of the Pam Cook and Claire Johnston article, ‘ The Place of Women
in the Cinema of Raoul Walsh ’, where they are attempting to
locate the status of ‘ Mamie Stover ’ as signifier in the film Mamie
Stover. Films centering on female protagonists are rare, and Mamie
Stover has been cited as one of these. Yet their analysis shows
that in fact Mamie Stover is not the organising function of the

film, but rather a sign, an emptied sign (which links up to 137
Barthes’s notion of myth as connotator as used by Claire Johnston
in her article: ‘ What was a complete sign consisting of a signifier
plus a signified, becomes merely the signifier of a new signified,
which subtly usurps the place of the original denotation Ex-
pressing nor woman herself, but a play of male desires and con-
flicts concerning the placing of man within the patriarchal order
(the Law), the film uses the myth of the powerful woman (Mamie’s
personality, her ‘ look ’ and her success in making money) who
seems to possess the phallus (the locus of power within the
patriarchal society) but who in fact is shown only to be the
phallus (the fetishisation of women). Within this woman as person
(that is, as a whole sign where ‘ woman ’ is denoted as such, rather
than being the signifier within another signification in which
‘ woman ’ is always connoted) is ‘ impotent ’. Man is released
from the threat of castration, and Mamie must divest herself of all
that made her such a threat (the return home, in the same clothes
she left in. the single suitcase) in order to reaffirm male dominance.

Thus as Pam Cook and Claire Johnston write, Mamie isn’t
sexual, but only an image of sexuality: though she is the seeming
protagonist of the film, she cannot write her own story, and must
submit at the end . to the disbelief of the policeman at tlie dock,
because, as a woman, how could she have ‘ made a fortune and
given it away ’. Male dominance is re-asserted even in the face,
particularly in the face, of the male-constructed castrating image
of woman. (Cf the interview with Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen
on their film Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons. Screen v 14 n 3.)

The film is in fact not about Mamie Stover, but about Richard
Egan’s successful rejection of her, which acts for all men as an as-
sertion of their own ‘ possession of the phallus ’, which in the film
Mamie is brought to accept and embrace as justified, discarding her
desire to make money (have power, like men) in favour of ‘ finding
her real self ’, back home in Leesburg. Mississippi. Pam Cook and
Claire Johnston use Lacanian notions of the Symbolic, the Real,
the Imaginary, the Law of the Father etc as a grid through which
they understand the textual gaps, the absences of the film. What is
important is not their revelation of the ‘ image ’ of Mamie Stover
as yet again a passive (emptied sign) agent for the working out
of male conflicts etc, but their placing of the filmic narrative, the
diegesis as a structure within which women must play certain roles,
not because of ideological prejudice, but because the resolution of
the diegesis depends on it.

That Mamie Stover is shown finally as having ‘ failed ’ is not so
much a reflection of reality as a construction of a desired reality,
the resolution in fiction of what remains in reality an ever-present
threat and conflict - castration. Thus the pleasure of the film (as
of most) is the resolution in fantasy of what remains a conflict in
reality. Films, so long as they are operating within the masculine.

138 fetishistic structure, can never present alternative images of women
(as being powerful, innovative, creative, authorative) TOthout sub-
verting this image at its conclusion. Showing her as a failure as
a woman, unable to keep a husband, without children, a ‘ home *;
or else showing her seduced by the (‘ natural ’) desire for these
into giving up her independence (Power) for a man. Indeed, in
Mamie Stover she gives these up not for a man (Richard Egan has
rejected her because of her phallic-ness) but for the possibility of
having a man.

(See also in relation to tliis last point, Elizabeth Dalton’s article
‘ Women at Work: Warners in the Thirties ’ in Velvet Light Trap
no 6. She quotes Rosalind Russell, who played at least twenty
career-women roles at various studios: ‘ Except for different lead-
ing men and a switch in title and pompadour, they were all
stamped out of the same Alice in Careerland. The script always
called for a leading lady somewhere in the 30’s, tall, brittle, not
too sexy. My wardrobe had a set pattern, a tan suit, a grey suit,
a beige suit, and then a negligee for the seventh reel, near the
end, when I w’ould admit to my best friend that what I really
wanted was to become a dear little housewife.’)

Images are not only the visual representations but the total
representations created in a film, through the interaction of the
visual with the diegetic which provides a content for the reading
of the visual. The visual image is already heavily ideologically
implicated. Lighting, camera angles, the cutting between actors
and use of close shot v long shot - all the techniques of ‘ filming ’ -
are used to differentiate radically the presentation of men and
women on the screen. This is pointed up, for example, in the
Warhol/Morrissey films where there is an almost exclusive trans-
ferral to the male actors of techniques normally used only for
women in films. Techniques which essentially produce a specularity
in relation to the character in a way which places her role in the
film as iconic rather than diegetic; ie the classical sexual objecti-
visation of women in films.

Through the emphasis on the iconic, women’s roles become far
more open to stereotyping than men’s roles in film. In her dis-
cussion of Erwin Panofsky’s theory of the development of icono-
graphy and stereotypes in the cinema, Claire Johnston {Notes on
Women’s Cinema, p 24) says * As the cinema developed, the stereo-
typing of man was increasingly interpreted as contravening the
realisation of the notion of “ character ”.’ But for women this was
not the case. It is thus not a question of the evasion by men of
stereotyping ‘ in the interests of realism ’ (Geraghty p 91) but
rather that the stereotyping of images of women has become a
cinematic convention connoting ‘ realism ’.

It is in this context that the demand for alternative images of
women in film is important. Both as polemic in relation to the
degrading and ‘ negative ’ images available in the media at present.

and because as Claire Johnston writes in her introduction to Notes 139
on Women’s Cinema in terms of the development of such alter-
native images: ‘ (Naome Gilburt’s) study of the emerging culture
heroine is interesting precisely because it examines the textual and
narrative reverberations which result from the displacement of
point of view which the women’s cinema involves

Elizabeth Cowie.

Television Studies

Discussion of television in Britain has been low level and restricted.
Criticism of programmes has been written from a stance created
out of that mixture of journalism and belles lettres that has
dominated and crippled so much criticism of the arts, especially
film criticism (though even film criticism, with all its limitations,
has not managed to produce the combination of egotism, pre-
tension and triviality that Clive James offers as television criticism
in The Observer). The more general discussion of television has
been limited by a preoccupation with investigating the effects on
audiences or by narrow social and aesthetic perspectives.

Recently there have been indications that the situation is
changing. The first two pamphlets in the new British Film Institute
series on television. Structures of Television by Nicholas Gamham
and Light Entertainment by Richard Dyer, as well as Television:
technology and cultural form (Fontana) by Raymond Williams all
contribute something to making the discussion of television more
substantial. Both Nicholas Gamham and Raymond Williams extend
the political and social limits of that discussion by not accepting
the conventional estimate that British television is pretty much
the best in the world as a given of the debate, and by situating
their respective discussion of institutional forms and the relation-
ship of technology to cultural forms within a specific political
situation.

Raymond Williams’ essay with its focus on the role of technology
in the development of television is of particular interest when
related to recent discussions of the role of technology in the
development of the cinema (see Patrick Ogle’s article on the
emergence of deep focus cinematography in the United States,
together with Christopher Williams’ comment on it, in Screen v 13
n 1. Spring 1972 and Jean Louis Comolli’s series of articles on
technique and ideology in Cahiers du cinema May/June 1971.
July 1971, August/September 1971 and November 1971 - avail-
able in translation from the BFI’s Educational Advisory Service).
Williams’ account with its analysis of an interplay of scientific,
political, social and aesthetic factors seriously challenges Comolli’s
more unilateral account of technological development as a deter-
mined instrument of bourgeois domination.

Nicholas Garnham and Raymond Williams both write about
television from inside a framework that stresses the role ideology
plays in maintaining the political status quo. Television is seen as
one of the principal carriers/expressers of the dominant ideology.
Garnham is quite clear about this. Referring to Marx’s well known
claim that social being determines consciousness he says*: ‘The
new emphasis on communication reverses this hierarchy, so that
ideology becomes the main weapon of oppression and carriers of
ideology such as the mass media become an important political
battleground,’

Williams does not express his political assumptions so overtly
in his essay but the position that can be deduced from it, while
undoubtedly a more nuanced one, seems close to Garnham’s. His
concluding discussion of the likely effects of contemporary tech-
nological development best indicates this. The possibility of a
* 1984 ’ situation is offered:

‘ We could have inexpensive, locally based, yet internationally
extended television systems, making possible communication and
information sharing on a scale that not long ago would have
seemed utopian. These are the contemporary tools of the long
revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy and
the recovery of effective communication in complex urban and
industrial societies. But they are also the tools of what would be,
in context, a short and successful counter-revolution, in which
under the cover of talk about choice and competition, a few
para-national corporations with their attendant states and agencies
could reach farther into our lives at every level from news to
psycho-drama, until individual and collective response to many
different kinds of experience and problem became almost limited
to choice between their programmed possibilities.’

The central political position that is given to ideology and the
way it operates in contemporary industrialised societies raises a
number of large issues. In the immediate terms of television critic-
ism, it leads to a preoccupation with one area of television pro-
grammes, the news area, since this is where ideology is most
apparently at work. Williams does make the interesting suggestion
that the unit of television criticism should be an evening’s pro-
grammes seen as a continuous flow rather than the individual
programme seen as separate and self-contained, but his most
detailed discussion centres on news programmes.

The area of television that comes under the broad heading of
entertainment and art is inevitably neglected. Since this area both
makes up the major part of most television services’ output and is
generally more popular with audiences than the news area, the
neglect is damaging though it is easy to understand why it occurs.
Entertainment and art programmes don’t normally have an overt
ideological function and consideration of their ideological dimen-

sion is complicated by questions of aesthetic conventions, the 141
relationship between ideology and pleasure, etc.

Richard Dyer’s essay on light entertainment is particularly
attractive in this context. Basically he starts from a social, psycho-
logical perspective which allows light entertainment programmes
an authenticity: ‘ Shows are entertaining because they assert
against the unpleasantness of reality certain hopes and ideals for
humanity, because they give pleasure by making the audience feel
what those ideals would be like if they were realised.*

This allows him to explain the general popularity of such pro-
grammes. But his awarenes of the ideological situation in which
these programmes are produced prevents him from taking them
only at face value. This ambivalent attitude encourages a critical
and sympathetic way of writing that avoids the puritanical heavi-
ness or the camp flipness that have been characteristic of discussion
in this area. Given its brevity the essay is inevitably sketchy and
suggestive rather than substantial, but it points towards a tele-
vision criticism that is ideologically aware but not limited by that
awareness.

Alan Lovell.

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142

Eisenstein’s Epistemology: A Response
from Dand Bordwell

This is by way of briefly developing some points touched upon in
Ben Brewster’s Editorial Note to my article, ‘ Eisenstein’s Epistemo-
logical Shift ’ in Screen v 15 n 4, Winter 1974/75. Our disagreement
centres upon Eisenstein’s use of the term * inner speech ’ in his
post-1930 writings. Brewster assumes this to be a transference
from its use in the work of Vygotsky (and, by implication, Eikhen-
baum); ie, as internalised social speech, rightly described by
Brewster as * a specialised variant of ordinary coifimunicative
language ’, My essay, however, assumed that Eisenstein’s use of
the term ‘ inner speech ’ applies instead to a non-verbal psychic
associationism underlying all behaviour, including language. I want
here to clarify some reasons for taking the latter as Eisenstein’s
point.

First, Eisenstein’s most thorough exposition of his later theory’s
epistemology, ‘ Word and Image ’ (1938) rests squarely upon
associationist premises. Brewster’s connection of Eisenstein’s
example of the remembering of ‘ five o’clock ’ to the French phrase
le five o'clock seems an unwarranted extrapolation and, anyhow,
Eisenstein’s other examples (his recalling ‘ 42nd Street ’ and * the
fateful midnight hour ’) cannot be so easily linked to vernacular
usage. Furthermore, Eisenstein’s account of concept-formation here
is plainly a private associationism, and though his ‘ inner speech ’
may manifest itself in communicative behaviour, it logically need
not. Indeed, Eisenstein’s mixing of examples from literature and
unverbalised recollections serves further to suggest that for him
inner speech is logically independent of verbal discourse. Thus this
account seems to me to fit Wittgenstein’s definition of private
language as ‘ the language which describes my experiences and
which only I myself can understand ’ (Philosophical Investigations
section 256).

Second, Brewster cites the essay-lecture ‘Film Form: New
Problems ’ to show Eisenstein’s debt to Vygotsky, but I do not see
that this essay supports his point. It is true that Eisenstein men-
tions the Moscow Neuro-Surgical Clinic, but Vygotsky and Luria

remain un-named (curious in itself in a speech full of references 143
to Lavater, Plekhanov, L^vy-Bruhl, Spencer and others). More im-
portant. I cannot see that Eisenstein here shows any awareness of
the necessarily verbal underpinnings of inner speech in Vygotsky’s
sense. Indeed, examples which Eisenstein draws from primitive
cultures suggest that his notion of inner speech is independent of
language. First, he points to a basic rule of decorum or unity as
manifested in the Polynesian custom of opening gates, untying
knots, etc, when a woman is in labour. No verbal behaviour is
included in the list, and Eisenstein plainly intends us to see here
some homology between thought and culture altogether un-
mediated by language. Another instance is also revealing. Eisenstein
notes that some cultures transgress the principle of self-identity
(eg, as manifested in a phrase like ‘ I am not I *). Here we have
psychic activity which contradicts not only formal logic but social
speech; in describing Bororo Indians* belief that they are at once
human beings and parakeets, Eisenstein stresses that ‘ It is not
here a matter of identity of names or relationships; they mean a
complete simultaneous identity of both ’ (Film Form, 135-136).

Thus by a pure abstraction of structure, Eisenstein distinguishes
inner speech from language; ‘ We are dealing here not with specific
methods, peculiar to this or that art-medium, but first and ioremost
'with a specific course and condition of embodied thinking - with
sensual thinking, for which a given structure is a law ’ (134).
Instead of Vygotsky’s internalised social speech, Eisenstein posits
a process of ‘ sensuous thought ’ which may manifest itself in a
variety of external behaviour patterns.

There are still other reasons for identifying Eisenstein’s ‘ inner
speech ’ with an empiricist associationism. The later theory’s
dependence upon ‘ mental images ’ is less plausibly attributed to
Vygotsky than to the Symbolist critic Andrej Belyj, whose analysis
of literary imagery exercised a great influence over Eisenstein’s
thinking in the late 1930’s. Moreover, on this account, the differ-
ences I discussed between October and Ivan the Terrible still seem
functional, plot or no plot, solely on stylistic grounds; the former’s
style can be seen as operating via dialectical oppositions, the
latter’s -via associationist linking of feelings. Tn sum, Brewster’s
remarks hold good for Vygotsky’s position on ’ inner speech *, but
I was not discussing Vygotsky’s position. I believe that Eisenstein’s
theory takes little more than the term from Vygotsky. For Vygotsky,
inner speech is a subset of social speech, while for Eisenstein
social speech (and art) is a subset of a psychic associationism he
calls ‘ inner speech ’. (In the original essay, incidentally. I had used
an over-cautious ‘ perhaps ’ in mentioning Eisenstein’s debts to
Vygotsky, but this was excised in the published text.) This is not
to deny, of course, that Vygotsky’s work also promises important
applications to film, as Brewster’s and other essays in the same
number of Screen copiously illustrate-